MY STUDY FIRE 



M 



Y STUDY 
F I R E 5j^ 



Hamilton Wright Mabie 



With SIXTY-FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS by 
MAUDE ALICE & GENEVIEVE COWLES 




NEIF YORK • PUBLISHED 
BY D O D D, MEAD AND 
COMPANY . MDCCCCW 



Copyright, i8go, i8gj, & i8(pg 
By Dodd, Mead and Company 
all rights reserved 



UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON 
AND SON • CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 



Oberlin College' IjWrary 

OCT 9 - 1940 



T5a353 

J?^^ TO 

J. T. M. 



Contents 



Chapter Page 

I. The Fire Lighted .... i 

II. Nature and Childhood . . n 

III. The Answer of Life ... 21 

IV. A Poet's Crown of Sorrow . 29 
V. The Failings of Genius . . 39 

VI. Christmas Eve 48 

VII. New Year's Eve 59 

VIII. A Scholar's Dream .... 67 

IX. A Flame of Driftwood . . 85 

X. Dream Worlds .... 91 

XL A Text from Sidney . . . loi 

XII. The Artist Talks . . . . 113 

XIII. Escaping from Bondage . . 121 

XIV. Some Old Scholars .... 127 
XV. Dull Days 136 

XVI. The Universal Biography . 143 

XVII. A Secret of Genius . . . 151 

XVIII. Books and Things .... 157 

XIX. A Rare Nature 165 



Chapter 

XX. The Cuckoo Strikes Twelve 

XXI. A Glimpse of Spring . . 

XXII. A Primeval Mood . . 

XXIII. The Method of Genius . 

XXIV. A Hint from the Season 
XXV. A Bed of Embers . 

XXVI. A Day Out of Doors . 

XXVII. Beside the Isis .... 

XXVIII. A Word for Idleness . 

XXIX. "The Bliss of Solitude" 

XXX. The Mystery of Atmosphere 

XXXI. A New Hearth . . . 

XXXII. An Idyl of Wandering 

XXXIII. The Open Window . , 



Page 

17,1 
181 
190 
198 
207 
215 
225 

235 
244 
251 
259 
266 
274 
283 



Illustrations 

Page 
Tanglewood Tales .... Frontispiece 

Intent upon the quick, contagion of flame . 2 

The glow rests first upon those faces eagerly 
searching the depths of the fire facing page 4 

Flickering gleams along the rows of books . 9 

Tail piece 10 

" My little heart beat fast and faster " 

facing page 1 6 

" Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls" 

facing page 2-j 

Tail piece 20 

The short December afternoon was already 
fading facing page 1 1 

There is the material for drama in the career 

of almost every person whom we know . . 25 

Began the evening by reading aloud 

facing page 3 1 

Even then the pretty bellows 41 

The Christmas tree in a glow of light . . 52 

" In their best dresses and their best faces " 

facing page 55 



Page 

The beautiful service of the church has been 

read facing page 5 6 

The last fire is fast sinking into ashes . . 60 

Adder' s-Tongues 64, 65 

He held the worn book almost reverently . 76 

He read the first page carefully, and with a 

growing confusion of thought facing page 79 

Under some spell of silence . facing page 85 

Through a gate in the city walls facing page 96 

Childhood contains in the germ all tiiat 

maturity ever develops 99 

The cheerful notes of the fire, singing lustily 102 

With leaf for tree, and flower for stalk . . 107 

Hidden flowers 108, 109 

No more welcome guest ever comes under 

our roof 114 

The rush of little feet . . . facing page 134 

A day of mist and rain 137 

Gives himself up to dreams 140 

Wrapped all visible things in a white mist of 

obscurity 144 

It is a veritable new world which stretches 
away, white and silent, toward the horizon 

facing page 145 

Dear faces of the household . . . 158, 159 



Page 

" Mamma, please play that " . . . . i6i 

Of all men the most unlucky 174 

The cuckoo flew out of his little door . . 178 

" March winds are rising" 182 

Tail piece — Bloodroots 189 

Hypaticas 196, 197 

There is a soft glow on her face .... 2co 

Flowers of June 208, 209 

The supreme charm of a woman is her 

atmosphere facing page 209 

The glowing embers sent a warm thrill into 

our very hearts facing page 220 

A clear, cold winter's morning facing page 227 

The little village in the hollow . . . , 233 

Beautiful Magdalen tower in the distance 

facing page 236 

Great thoughts rise out of the silent deep . 247 

Spring out of the hidden places of the soil . 249 

A village remote . 252 

One finds in solitude only that which he 

takes into it 253 

Where the apple blossoms still rain the 

sweetness of perennial summer .... 254 

There is no symbol of permanency so im- 
pressive as a mountain range . facing page 261 



Page 

We give ourselves to the rooms in which we 
live and the tools with whicii we work 

facing page 268 

Like a child let loose from city squares, 
runs through meadows white with daisies 

facing page 275 

Butterflies 275 

Tail piece 288 



My Study Fire 
¥ 

CHAPTER I 

THE^FIRE LIGHTED 

HE lighting of the fire in 
my study is an event ci 
importance in the calendar 
of the domestic year; it 
marks the close of one sea- 
son, and announces the 
advent of another. There 
is always a touch of pathos in the last warm 
autumnal days, that makes the cordial ac- 
ceptance of winter a kind of infidelity to 
the months that have lavished their gifts of 
life and beauty at our threshold. I am quite 
willing to shiver at my writing-table on 
sharp autumnal mornings in order that the 
final act of separation from summer may 
be postponed a little. This year we have 
been more than ever reluctant to sever 
the last tie with a seasan which has be- 




friended us as none of its predecessors has 
ever done, and it was not until a keen 
northwester shook the house yesterday that 
we prepared the hearth for its annual fire. 
The day broke cold and gray, with an un- 
mistakable aspect of winter in the sky and 
upon the fields ; the little landlocked har- 
bour looked bleak and desolate, and the 
wide expanse of water beyond was dark, 
cold, and threatening. I found my study 
cheerless and unfamiliar ; it was deserted by 
one season, and the next had not yet taken 
possession of it. It was a barren day ; 
thought and feeling were both congealed, 
and refused to flow, and even the faithful 
pen, that has patiently traversed 
so many sheets of blank paper, 
stumbled and halted. After a fruit- 
less struggle with 
myself and my en- 
vironment, I yielded 
to the general de- 
pression and closed 
my portfolio. A 
long walk brought 
me into harmony 
with nature, and 

2 




when I returned I was not sorry to see 
that the andirons had been heaped with 
wood in my absence, and all things made 
ready for lighting the fire. 

We lingered long at the dinner-table 
that evening, and when we left it a com- 
mon impulse seemed to lead us into the 
study. Rosalind always lights the fire, 
and one of the pleasant impressions of the 
annual ceremonial is the glow of the first 
blaze upon her fair face and waving hair. 
Two little heads mingled their wealth of 
golden tresses at one end of the rug, intent 
upon the quick, mysterious contagion of 
flame which never fails to fill them with 
wonder ; while in the background 1 watched 
the picture, so soon to take on a new and 
subtle beauty, with curiously mixed regret 
and anticipation. I take out my watch in 
unconscious recognition of the importance 
of an event which marks the autumnal 
equinox in the household calendar. At 
the same moment a little puff" of smoke 
announces that the momentous act has 
been performed ; all eyes are fixed on the 
fireplace, and every swift advance of flame, 
creeping silently from stick to stick until 
3 



the whole mass is wrapped in fire, is noted 
with deepening satisfaction. A genial 
warmth begins to pervade the room, and 
the soft glow falls first on the little group, 
and then passes on to touch the pictures 
and the rows of books with its luminous 
and transfiguring cheer. I am suddenly 
conscious that a new spirit has taken pos- 
session of the room, liberated no doubt by 
the curling flames that are now singing 
among the sticks, and hinting that it is 
winter, after all, which forces from sum- 
mer her last and rarest charm, her deepest 
and most spiritual truth. That which has 
vanished to the eye lives in the thought, 
and takes on its most elusive and yet its 
most abiding beauty. 

This first lighting of the fire in my study 
is, indeed, a brief transfiguration of life ; 
it discloses to me anew the very soul of 
nature, it reveals the thought that runs 
through literature, it discovers the heart 
of my hope and aspiration. I catch in 
this transient splendour a vision of the 
deepest meaning which life and art have 
for me. The glow rests first upon those 
faces, eagerly searching the depths of the 
4 




The glow rests first upon those faces eagerly searching the depths of the fire. 



fire, that are the very heart of mv heart ; 
it rests next upon the books in which the 
thoughts of the great teachers and the 
dreams of the great artists remain inde- 
structible; it steals last through the win- 
dows, and, even in the night, seems to 
bathe the far-reaching landscape in a pass- 
ing glorv. Like the spirit which Faust 
summoned into his study, it reveals to me 

" A weaving, flowing 
Life, all glowing," 

After a time the golden heads begin to 
nod, and the dreams which they have seen 
in the glowing coals and the dancing 
flames begin to mingle with the dreams 
which sleep weaves with such careless, 
audacious fingers over the unconscious 
hours. The good-nights are soon said, 
and the little feet, already overtaken with 
drowsiness, make uncertain sounds on 
the stairs as they take up their journey 
to slumberland. Rosalind returns in a 
moment, and draws her easy-chair before 
the fire, with some fragile apology for 
occupation in her hands. The lamp has 
not been lighted, and neither of us seems 

5 



to note the absence of its friendly flame. 
The book that we have been reading aloud 
by turns lies unopened, and the stream of 
talk that generally touches the events of 
the day in little eddies and then flows on 
to deeper themes is lost in a silence which 
neither is willing to break, because it is so 
much fuller of meaning than any words 
could be. Like the ancient river of Elis, 
thought flows on underground, and is per- 
haps all the deeper and sweeter because 
it does not flash into speech. 

For a long time I do nothing but dream, 
and dreams are by no means unprofitable 
to those whose waking hours are given to 
honest work ; dreams are not without 
meaning, for they are combined of memory 
and prophecy so subtly that no chemistry 
of philosophy has yet been able to separate 
them into their component parts. In his 
dreams a thoughtful man sees both his 
past and his future pass before him in the 
order of their real sequence ; there are 
the memories, not so much of his. acts as 
of the purposes that were behind them, 
and there are the aspirations and hopes 
with which he unconsciously fills the years 



to come. A bad man cannot face an open 
fire with comfort, and he must be a man 
of rare fidelity of purpose and achievement 
to whom its searching light does not bring 
some revelations of himself which he would 
rather have hidden under the ashes of the 
past. 

While I was meditating on the moral 
uses of a fire on the hearth, Rosalind put 
on a fresh stick, and stirred the half-burned 
wood with an energy that raised a little 
shower of sparks. The tongues of flame 
began to circle about the hickory, eager, 
apparently, to find the responsive glow 
sleeping in its sound and reticent heart. 
I recalled the strip of woodland from 
which it was cut, and like a vision I saw 
once more the summer skies and heard the 
summer birds. The seasons are so linked 
together in the procession of the year that 
they are never out of sight of each other. 
Even now, as I step to the window, and 
look upon the bleak landscape under the 
cold light of the wintry stars, I see just 
beyond the retreating splendour of autumn ; 
I hear at intervals the choirs of summer 
chanting to the sun their endless adoration ; 
7 



and from the front of the column, almost 
lost to sight, come whiff's of that delicate 
fragrance which escaped when spring broke 
the alabaster box and poured out the treas- 
ures of the year. Each season has lavished 
its wealth on me, and each has awakened 
its kindred moods and stirred its kindred 
thoughts within me. I am conscious, as I 
look into the bed of glowing coals to which 
the fire has sunk, that I am even now 
undergoing the subtle process of change 
from season to season. The habits, the 
moods, the impressions, which summer 
created in me have gone, and new apti- 
tudes, thoughts, and emotions have taken 
their place. The world through which I 
have wandered with vagrant feet these 
past months, intent only to keep a heart 
open to every voice from field and wood 
and sky, has sunk below the horizon, and 
another and different world has risen into 
view. Pan pipes no more, while Orion 
blazes overhead and leads the glittering 
constellations. Thought, that has played 
truant through the long days, forgetting 
books and men in its chase after beauty 
and its stealthy ambuscade of the hermit' 



thrush in the forest, returns once more to 
brood over the problems of its own being, 
and to search for the truth that lies at the 
bottom of the wells that men have dug 
along the route of history for the refresh- 
ment of the race. 

The glow of the dying fire no longer 
reaches the windows ; the world beyond is 
left undisturbed to night and darkness; but 
it still sends flickering gleams along the 
rows of books, and lights up their dusky 
titles. These are the true companions of 
the short wintry days and the long wintry 
nights. To find the life that is in them, 
to, read with clear eyes whatever of truth 
they contain, to see face to face the deep 
human experiences out of which they grew 
— these are the tasks to which the season 
leads us. In 
summer the 




senses wander abroad, and thought keeps 
company with them, hand in hand with 
nature, eager to see, to hear, and to feel ; 
in winter the wanderers return to the fire, 
to recall and meditate upon the scenes in 
which they have mingled, and of which 
they themselves have been a part. 

Rosalind gives the fire another stirring, 
and the last latent flame flashes up and 
falls upon that ancient handbook of life and 
toil, Hesiod's " Works and Days." How 
happily the old Greek ensnared the year, 
with all its hours and tasks, in that well- 
worn title ! We, too, shall share with 
him the toils and pleasures of the seasons. 
We have had our Days ; our Works 
await us. 




CHAPTER II 



^ NATURE AND CHILDHOOD 

'^ (l,V/<^^ S it not due to November 
^ V f/rC^"^ '"^^'- ^*^'^^ discreet person 
m should revise what the poets 
Jt-Al \/^M ^^^^ ^^^^ about it ? For 
t'^ii °"^' ^ '^'^^^ ^^^"^ "*^ slight 
% VJL ^) sense of shame as I opened 
to the melancholy lines full 
of the wail of winds and the sob of rain, 
while a brilliant autumnal light has flooded 
the world. The days have passed in a state- 
ly procession, under skies so cloudless and 
serene and with such amplitude of golden 
light that I have sometimes thought I saw 
a little disdain of the accessories of the 
earlier season. It has seemed as it 
November, radiant and sunlit, needed no 
soft fleecy clouds, no budding flowers, no 
rich and rustling foliage, to complete her 
charm. Even the splendid tradition of 
October has not overawed its maligned 



successor, and of the oft-repeated slanders 
of the poets no notice has been taken save 
perhaps to cast a more brilliant light upon 
their graves. It is certainly high time that 
the traditional November should give 
place to the actual November — month 
of prolonged and golden light, with just 
enough of cloud and shadow to heighten 
by contrast the brilliancy of the sunshine. 
The border-land between winter and sum- 
mer is certainly the most beautiful and 
alluring part of the year. The late spring 
and the late autumn months hold in equi- 
poise the charms of both seasons. Their 
characteristics are less pronounced and 
more subtle ; and they are for that reason 
richer in suggestiveness and more alluring 
to the imagination. 

I have watched the flight of the autum- 
nal days from my study windows as one 
watches the distant passage of the birds 
southward. They have carried the last 
memories of summer with them, but with 
what grace and majesty they have retreated 
before an invisible foe ! With slow and 
noiseless step, pausing for days together in 
soft, unbroken dreams, they have passed 



beyond the horizon line and left me under 
a spell so deep that I have hardly yet 
shaken it off and turned to other sights 
and thoughts. One of the great concerns 
of life is this silent, unbroken procession 
of the seasons, rising from the deeps of 
time like dreams sent to touch our mortal 
life with more than mortal beauty. Stars, 
tides, flowers, foliage, birds, clouds, snows, 
and storms — how marvellous is the frame 
in which they appear and disappear about 
us ; as real as ourselves, and yet as fleeting 
and elusive as our dreams ! 

Rosalind and I have often talked about 
these things as they appear to children, and 
we are agreed that nature is a good deal 
nearer and more intelligible to childhood 
than most people think. Children of 
sensitive and imaginative temper have 
marvellous capacity for receiving impres- 
sions : they absorb as unconsciously to 
themselves as to others. When they seem 
most indifferent or preoccupied, they are 
often most impressionable. Unperceived 
by those who are nearest them, unrecog- 
nised at the moment by themselves, there 
often press upon the mind of a child the 
13 



deepest and most awful mysteries of life; 
mysteries that lie far below the plummet 
of thought. It is only as one thinks back 
and recalls out of memory those marvellous 
moments when every visible thing seemed 
suddenly smitten with unreality in the 
presence of some great spiritual truth, felt 
but uncomprehended, that one realises the 
depth and richness of the unspoken 
thoughts of children. In a passage of 
great beauty De Quincey has described 
the feelings that came when as a boy he 
stood beside the form of his dead sister. 
" There lay the sweet childish figure ; there 
the angel face ; and, as people usually 
fancy, it was said in the house that not 
one feature had suffered any change. Had 
they not? The forehead, indeed — the 
serene and noble forehead — that might 
be the same ; but the frozen eyelids, the 
darkness that seemed to steal from beneath 
them, the marble lips, the stiffening hands, 
laid palm to palm, as if repeating the sup- 
plications of closing anguish — could these 
be mistaken for life .'' Had it been so, 
wherefore did I not spring to those heav- 
enly lips with tears and never ending 
14 



kisses ? But so it was not. I stood checked 
for a moment ; awe, not fear, fell upon 
me ; and whilst I stood, a solemn wind 
began to blow — the saddest that ear ever 
heard. It was a wind that might have 
swept the fields of mortalitv for a thousand 
centuries. Many times since, upon sum- 
mer days, when the sun is about the 
hottest, I have remarked the same wind 
arising and uttering the same hollow, 
solemn Memnonian but saintly swell ; it 
is in this world the one great audible sym- 
bol of eternity." That wind, more real 
than any that ever blew over earthly fields, 
was heard by no one but the imaginative 
child standing, to all appearance, silent and 
spellbound beside his sister's form. 

Not long ago Rosalind was looking 
through Goethe's " Autobiography " to 
recall what the German boy of six years 
thought of the terrible earthquake at 
Lisbon in 1755, when she happened upon 
another very interesting and significant 
passage in child life. The boy Goeihe 
had heard much of the discussion about 
religious matters which was warm in those 
days, and invaded even the quiet and 
15 



somewhat dry atmosphere of his father's 
house. He gave no sign, but these things 
sank into his heart, and finally there came 
to him the great thought that he too might 
personally approach the invisible God of 
nature. " The God who stands in imme- 
diate connection with nature, and owns 
and loves it as his work, seemed to him 
the proper God, who might be brought 
into closer relationship with man, as with 
everything else, and who would take care 
of him as of the motion of the stars, the 
days and seasons, the animals and plants. 
The boy could ascribe no form to this 
Being ; he therefore sought him in his 
works, and would, in the good Old Testa- 
ment fashion, build him an altar." To 
accomplish this deep and secret purpose 
he took a lacquered music-stand and 
ornamented it according to his own idea 
of symbolism. This done, and the fumi- 
gating pastils arranged, the young priest 
awaited the rising of the sun. When the 
red light lay bright along the edges of 
the roofs, he held a burning-glass above 
the pastils, ignited them, and so obtained 
both the flame and the fragrance necessary 



- My hrtif kt^n ht^tja^ ^KJfas:f- 



to his worship. Does not this strange, 
secret act in a child's lite parallel and 
explain some of the earliest experiences of 
the most primitive races ? 

A beautiful and prophetic story is told 
of William Henry Channing by his latest 
biographer. He was a singularly noble 
boy ; graceful in figure, charriiing in man- 
ner, expressive in countenance, sensitive, 
responsive, and imaginative. One night 
after he had fallen asleep he was suddenly 
awakened by a noise, and, looking out of 
the window, he saw a splendid star shining 
full upon him. "It fascinated my gaze," 
he writes, " till it became like an angel's 
eye. It seemed to burn in and penetrate 
to my inmost being. My little heart beat 
fast and faster, till I could bear the intoler- 
able blaze no more. And, hearing the 
steps of some servant in the passage, I 
sprang from my crib, ran swiftly to the 
door, and, in my long nightgown, with 
bare, noiseless feet, followed down the 
stairway to the lower hall. . . . The foot- 
man flung open the drawing-room door, 
and a flood of light, with a peal of 
laughter, burst forth, and in the midst 
2 '7 



some voice cried out, ' What is that in 
white behind you ? ' The servant had, 
affrighted, turned and drawn aside. In- 
stantly from the brilliant circle stepped 
forth my mother, and, folding me in her 
bosom, said soothingly, ' What troubles 
my boy ? ' All I could do was to fling 
my arms about her neck and whisper 
'Oh, mamma! The star ! the star! 1 
could not bear the star ! ' " 

There is a famous description of a 
kindred experience in one of those poems 
of Wordsworth's which have become part 
of the memory of all lovers of nature. It 
was the first poem I ever heard Emerson 
read, and the strange, penetrating sweet- 
ness of that voice, so spiritual in its tone, 
so full of interpretation in its accent, is 
for me part of the verse itself: 

" There was a Boy ; ye knew him well, ye cliffs 
And islands ofWinander ! — many a time 
At evening, when the earliest stars began 
To move along the edges of the hilis. 
Rising or setting, would he stand alone. 
Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake ; 
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands 
Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth 



Uplifted, he, as through an instrument. 
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, 
That they might answer him. And they would 

shout 
Across the watery vale, and shout again. 
Responsive to his call, with quivering peals. 
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes Jcud, 
Redoubled and redoubled ; concourse wild 
Of mirth and jocund din ! And, when it chanced 
That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill. 
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung 
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise 
Has carried far into his heart the voice 
Of mountain torrents ; or the visible scene 
Would enter unawares into his mind 
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks. 
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received 
Into the bosom of the steady lake." 

The wonderful experience, described in 
these lines with the inimitable simplicity 
of nature itself, marks an epoch in a child's 
life ; it is as if a door were suddenly left 
ajar into some world unseen before, 
" Never shall I forget that inward occur- 
rence, till now narrated to no mortal," says 
Richter, " wherein I witnessed the birth 
of my self-consciousness, of which I can 
still give the time and place. One fore- 
19 



noon I was standing, a very young child, 
in the outer door, and looking leftward at 
the stack of the fuel-wood, when all at 
once the internal vision, ' I am a me ' 
(A/) bin e'ln Ich)^ came like a flash from 
heaven before me, and in gleaming light 
ever afterward continued." The incom- 
municable world of childhood, through 
which we have all walked, but which lies 
hidden from us now by a golden mist — 
was it not the poetic prelude of life, 
wherein the deepest things were seen at 
times in clear vision, and the sublimest 
mysteries appealed to us with a strange 
familiarity ! To imaginative childhood, is 
not the cycle of the changing seasons what 
it was to the German boy in the narrow 
and straitened country parsonage, an idyl- 
year ? And is there not for every child 
of kindred soul " an idyl-kingdom and 
pastoral world in a little hamlet and 
parsonage " ? 



f/ . !"■ f\^ !'>' f'^ /'■> , . My 




MlLXJ 




BUnv mimic hootings to the silent onvls 



«^ H-^ 



^^^^^EtgT-.— ^^grz?^ . j^— Bi^»a^ 







>!<«*«, 




CHAPTER III 

THK AXSWKR OF LIFE 

HE short December 
afternoon was already 
fading in a clear white 
light on the low hills, 
and the shadows were 
1 creeping stealthily 
from point to point, 
alert to seize every advantage and follow 
the retreating steps of day without break or 
pause. It was that most delightful of all 
hours, when work, is done and the active 
enjoyment or companionship of the even- 
ing has not begun. Rosalind had come 
in from a long walk with a charming air 
of vigor and \'itality, which seemed to 
impart itself to the whole room. She gave 
the fire an energetic stirring, which brought 
its glow to a focus and kindled its latent 
flame into a sudden and fiery splendour. 



Then she drew up a low ottoman, and sat 
down to enjoy the cheer and warmth 
which she had evoked. It was not the 
first time that something which had smol- 
dered in my hands had caught life and 
beauty in hers. I was in a sombre mood. 
I had spent the morning, and, for that 
matter, a good many mornings, re-reading 
the Greek plays, and striving by a patient 
and persistent use of the imagination to 
possess myself of the secret of those 
masterly and immortal creations. To me 
they had long ceased to be dead, and to- 
day especially they were more vital and 
palpable than anything that I saw in the 
world around me. I had finished again 
that splendid trilogy in which ^schylus 
unfolds the doom of the house of Atreus. 
I had seen the flashing fires which lighted 
Agamemnon home to his death ; I had 
heard Cassandra's awful monody ; I had 
heard, too, that appalling cry which seemed 
to run through the world like the shudder 
of a doomed soul when the great leader 
fell in his own palace ; I had witnessed 
the vengeance of the offended gods through 
the hands of Orestes; and I had followed 



the Fury-haunted steps of the unwilling 
executioner of the eternal law from the 
temple at Delphi to the judgment seat at 
Athens. All these things were still in my 
memory, and the room had caught a solemn 
and awful quietude in the overshadowing 
presence of these vast and terrible repre- 
sentations of antique life. 

Rosalind's coming broke the spell of 
memories that pressed too heavily on heart 
and mind; she seemed to reunite me with 
the movement of present life, and to lead 
me out of the subterranean depths where 
the springs of the great drama of history 
are concealed, to the sunlight and bloom 
of the upper world. In her I suddenly 
found the key to the mystery which I had 
sought in vain to solve by process of 
thought, for in her I saw the harmony of 
law with beauty and joy, the rounded 
circle of right action, and a temperament 
akin with light and song and the sweetness 
of nature. 

" You are thinking," she said at last, as 

she turned toward me, as if to carry further 

a line of thought which she seized by the 

mingled intuition of long affection and 

23 



intimate fellowship — "you are thinking 
that — " 

" I was thinking that you are often a 
better answer to my questions than I can 
ever hope to frame for myself. I was 
thinking that the deepest mysteries of life 
are explained, and the deepest problems of 
life are solved, not by thinking but by 
living. When I see a man who has 
broken a fundamental law, and by patience, 
penitence, and labour has regained the 
harmony which he lost, I no longer sorrow 
that ^Eschylus's 'Prometheus Bound' is a 
fragment. I see before me in actual real- 
isation the solution which the dramatist 
undoubtedly presented in the two plays of 
the Trilogy which are lost. Genius can 
do much, but even genius falls short of the 
actuality of a single human life. I have 
been among my books all day, and they 
have confused and overpowered me with 
doubts and questions which start in books 
but are rarely answered there ; you have 
come in, fresh, buoyant, and full of hope, 
from contact with life, where these ques- 
tions find their answers if we are only 
willing to keep an open mind and heart." 
24 



" But don't you think," Rosalind inter- 



rupted. 




that the problems of living are 
more dramatically 
and clearly stated in 
books than in the 
lives of the men and 
women we know in 
this \illage ? " 

" Yes," I said, 
holding a newspaper 
before my face to 
shield it from the 
glow of the ambitious 
fire ; "yes, more 
dramatically stated, 
because all the irrele- 
There is the 



vant details are omitted 
material for a drama in 
the career of almost every 
person whom we know, 
but the movement is 
overlaid and concealed by 
all kinds of trivial matter. 
A dramatist would seize 
the dramatic movement 
and bring it into clear 
view by casting all this 
25 




aside. He would disentangle the thread 
from the confused web into which every 
life runs to a casual observer. The 
problems are more clearly stated in books 
than in life, but they are not so clearly 
answered." 

Here the children rushed in with some 
request, which they whispered in solemn 
secrecy to their common confidant, and 
then, receiving the answer they hoped for, 
rushed out again. It was a detached seg- 
ment of life which they brought in and 
took out of the study in such eager haste. 
I knew neither the cause of the glow on 
their cheeks, nor of the light in their eyes, 
nor of the deep mystery which surrounded 
them as with an atmosphere. 

" There is more to be learned from 
those children concerning the mysteries 
of life," I said, after they had gone, " than 
from any book which it has ever been my 
fortune to happen upon. The mysteries 
which perplex me are not so much in the 
appearance of things, and in their definite 
relations, as in the processes through which 
we are all passing. I have always had a 
secret sympathy with those old Oriental 
26 



religions which deified the processes of 
nature — the births and deaths and growth 
of things. The festivals which greeted 
the return of spring, with overflowing life 
in its train, and the sad processionals 
which lamented the departure of summer 
and the incoming of death, had a large 
element of reality in them. They appeal 
to me more than the worship of the serene 
gods whose faces and forms are so per- 
fectly defined in art. 

" I do not believe," I added, laying 
down the newspaper and stirring the fire 
for the sake of the glow on the deepening 
shadows in the room — " I do not believe 
that the deeper problems of living ever can 
be answered by the processes of thought. 
I believe that life itself teaches us either 
patience with regard to them, or reveals to 
us possible solutions when our hearts are 
pressed close against duties and sorrows 
and experiences of all kinds. I believe 
that in the thought and feelings and suffer- 
ings of children, for instance, an observer 
will often catch, as in a flash of revelation, 
some fruitful suggestion of his own relation 
to the universe, some far-reaching analogy 



of the processes of his own growth. This 
wisdom of experience, which often ripens 
even in untrained minds into a kind of 
clairvoyant vision, is the deepest wisdom 
after all, and books are only valuable and 
enduring as they include and express it." 

I was just about to illustrate by saying 
that for this reason " The Imitation of 
Christ " has survived all the great volumes 
of learning and philosophy of its age, when 
the bell rang, and a visitor robbed me of 
my audience. 



CHAPTER IV 




A POET'S CROWN OF SORROW 

ITTING here at my writing- 
table loaded with magazines, 
reviews, and recent books, 
the fire burning cheerily on 
the hearth, Rosalind medita- 
tively plying her needle, and 
wind and rain without in- 
creasing by contrast the in- 
ner warmth and brightness, it is not easy 
to realise the pathos of life as one reads it 
in poetry, nor to enter into its mystery of 
suffering as it has pressed heavily upon 
some of the greatest poets. The fountains 
of joy and sorrow are for the most part 
locked up in ourselves, but there are always 
those against whom, by some mysterious 
conjunction of the stars, calamitv and dis- 
aster are written in a lifelong sentence. 
It is the lot of all superior natures to suf- 
fer as a part of their training and as the 
29 



price of their gifts ; but this suffering has 
often no thorn of outward loss thrust into 
its sensitive heart. There are those, how- 
ever, on whose careers shadows from with- 
in and from without meet in a common 
darkness and complete that slow anguish 
of soul by which a personal agony is some- 
times transmuted into a universal consola- 
tion and strength. The anguish of the 
cross has always been the prelude to the 
psalms of deliverance, and the world has 
made no new conquest of truth and life 
except through those who have trodden the 
via dolorosa. 

I am quite sure that these thoughts are 
in the mind, or rather in the heart, of 
Rosalind, for she drops her work at inter- 
vals and looks into the fire with the intent- 
ness of gaze of one who sees something 
which she does not understand. I am not 
blind to the vision which lies before her 
and fills her with doubt and uncertainty. 
It is the little town of Tous which the fire 
pictures before her, its white roofs glisten- 
ing in the light of the Persian summer 
day. But it is not the beauty of the 
Oriental city which holds her gaze, it is 
3° 




Began the evening by reading aloud. 



the funeral train of a dead poet passing 
through the western gate while the reward 
of his immortal work, long withheld by an 
ignoble king, is borne into the deserted 
streets by the slow-moving camels. Surely 
the irony of what men call destiny was 
never more strikingly illustrated than in 
the story of Firdousi, the great epic poet 
who sang for Persia as Homer sang for 
Greece. Rosalind, who always wants to 
know a man of genius on the side of his 
misfortunes or his heart history, began the 
evening by reading aloud I\lr. Gosse's 
picturesque " Firdousi in Exile," a poem 
of pleasant descriptive qualitv, but lacking 
that undertone of pathos which the story 
ought to have carried with it. Such a 
story puts one in a silent mood, and in the 
lull of conversation I have read to mvself 
Mr. Arnold's fine rendering of the famous 
episode of " Sohrab and Rustem " from the 
*>' Epic of Kings " ; a noble piece of Eng- 
lish blank verse, from which I cannot for- 
bear quoting a well-known passage, so full 
of deep, quiet beauty is it : 
" But the majestic river floated on, 

Out of the mist and hum of that low land, 
31 



Into the frosty stai light, and there moved. 
Rejoicing, through the hush'd Chorasmian waste. 
Under the solitary moon ; he flow'd 
Right for the polar star, past Orgunje, 
Brimming, and bright, and large; then sands begin 
To hem his watery march, and dam his streams. 
And split his currents ; that for manv a league 
The shorn and parcell'd (3xus strains along 
Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles — 
Oxus, forgetdng the bright speed he had 
In his high mountain cradle in Pamere, 
A foil'd circuitous wanderer — till at last 
The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide 
His luminous home of waters opens, bright 
And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed 

stars 
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea." 

Not unlike the movement of the Oxus 
was the life of the poet whose song has 
touched it with a beauty not its own ; a 
life fretted by jealousies, broken by stupid 
treachery, but sweeping onward, true to its 
star, and finding peace ?t last in that 
fathomless sea to which all life is tributary. 
The pathos of such life lies not so much 
in individual suffering as in th*^ contrast 
between the service rendered and the 
recognition accorded to it. The poet had 
3 a 



.mmortalised his countr)- and his master, 
and his reward after thirty years of toil 
was a long exile. 

"In vain through sixty thousand verses clear 
He sang of feuds and battles, friend and foe, 
Of the frail heart of Kaous, spent with fear. 

And Kal Khosrau who vanished in the snow, 
And white-haired Zal who won the secret love 

Of Rudabeh where water-lilies blow. 
And lordliest Rustem, armed by gods above 
With every power and virtue mortals 
know," 

For this inestimable service of holding 
aloft over Persian history the torch of the 
imagination until it lay clear and luminous 
in the sight of the centuries, Firdousi was 
condemned to learn the bitterness of wide 
and restless wanderings. Many a Tartar 
camp knew him ; Herat, the mountains 
about the Caspian, Astrabad, the Tigris, 
and Bagdad saw the white-haired poet pass, 
or accorded him a brief and broken rest 
from journeying. There is an atmosphere 
of poetry about these ancient names, but 
no association is likely to linger longer in 
the memory of men than the fact that they 
were stations in Firdousi's exile. It is one 

3 33 



of the unconscious gifts of genius that it 
bestows immortahty upon all who come 
into relation with it. But the crowning 
touch of pathos came at the close, when 
the long-withheld treasure entered the 
gates of Tous as the body of the poet was 
borne out of the city to its last repose. 
The repentance of Mahmoud had come 
too late ; he had blindly thrust aside the 
richest crown of good fame ever offered to 
a Persian king. 

But there are sadder stories than that of 
Firdousi ; one story, notably, which all 
men recall instinctively when they speak 
of exile. The Persian poet had written 
the " Epic of Kings " in a palace, and 
with the resources of a king at command, 
but Dante was a homeless wanderer in the 
years which saw the birth of the Divine 
Comedy. To that great song in which 
the heart of Mediaevalism was to live for- 
ever, Florence contributed nothing but the 
anguish of soul through which the mind 
slowly finds its way to the highest truth. 
A noble nature, full of deep convictions, 
fervent loves, with the sensitiveness and 
prophetic sight of genius, cut off from all 
34 



natural channels of growth, activity, and 

ambition, condemned to 

"... prove how salt a savour hath 

The bread of others, and how hard a path 
To climb and to descend the stranger's stairs." 
Surely no great man ever ate his bread 
wet with tears of deeper bitterness than 
Dante. One has but to recall his stern 
love of truth and his intense sensitiveness 
to injustice, to imagine in some degree what 
fathomless depths of suffering lay hidden 
from the eyes of men under that calm, 
majestic composure of manner and speech. 
The familiar story of his encounter with 
the Florentine blacksmith comes to mind 
as indicating how his proud spirit resented • 
the slightest injustice. One morning as the 
blacksmith was singing snatches from the 
song of the new poet, Dante passed by, 
listened a moment, and then, in a sudden 
passion, strode into the shop and began 
throwing the implements which the smith 
had about him into the street. 

" What are you doing ? Are you mad ? " 
cried the blacksmith, so overcome with 
astonishment that he made no effort to 
protect hiij property. 
35 



" And what are you doing I " replied the 
poet, fast emptying the shop of its tools. 

" I am working at my proper business, 
and you are spoiling my work." 

" If vou do not wish me to spoil your 
things, do not spoil mine." 

" What thing of yours am I spoiling ? " 

"You are singing something of mine, 
but not as I wrote it. 1 have no other 
trade but this, and you spoil it for me." 

The poet departed as abruptly as he 
came. He had satisfied the sense of 
injustice done him by swift punishment ; 
and it does not surprise us to be told by 
Sacchetti that the blacksmith, having col- 
lected his scattered tools and returned to 
his work, henceforth sang other songs. 
This simple incident discloses that sensi- 
tiveness to injustice which made the ban- 
ishment of Dante one long torture of 
soul. They utterly mistake the nature of 
greatness who imagine that the bitterest 
sorrow of such experiences as those of 
Firdousi and Dante lies in loss of those 
things which most men value ; the sharp- 
est thorn in such crowns is tlie sense of 
ingratitude and injustice, the consciousness 
36 



of the possession of great gifts rejected and 
cast aside. There is nothing more tragic 
in all the range of life than the fate of 
those who, like Jeremiah, Cassandra, and 
Tiresias, are condemned to see the truth, 
to speak it, and to be rebuked and rejected 
by the men about them. C'ouiil anything 
be more agonising than to sec clearly an 
approaching danger, to point it out, and be 
thrust aside with laughter or curses, and 
then to watch, helpless and solitary, the 
awful and implacable approach of doom ? 
In some degree this lot is shared by every 
poet, and to the end of time every poet 
will find such a sorrow a part of his 
birthright. 

" After all," said Rosalind, suddenly 
breaking the silence of thought that has 
evidently travelled along the same path as 
my own — " after all, I 'm not sure that 
they are to be pitied." 

" Pity is the last word I should think 
of in connection with them ; it is only a 
confusion of ideas which makes us even 
feel like pitying them. The real business 
of life, as Carlyle tried so hard to make us 
believe, is to find the truth and to live by 
37 



it. If, in the doing of tiiis, what men call 
happiness falls to our lot, well and good ; 
but it must be as an incident, not as an 
end. There come to great, solitary, and 
sorely smitten souls moments of clear 
sight, of assurance of victory, of unspeak- 
able fellowship with truth and life and 
God, which outweigh years of sorrow and 
bitterness. Firdousi knew that he had 
left Persia a priceless possession, and the 
Purgatorio of Dante was not too much to 
pay for the Paradiso." 

" And yet," said Rosalind slowly, look- 
ing into the fire, and thinking, perhaps, of 
the children asleep with happy dreams, and 
all the sweet peace of the home — "and 
yet how much they lose ! " 



38 




CHAPTER V 

THE FAILINGS OF 
GENIUS 

HE study fire burns for the 
most part in a quiet, 
meditative way that falls 
in with the thought and 
the talk that are inspired 
by it. Occasionally, 
. however, it crackles and snaps in an argu- 
mentative mood that makes one wonder 
what sort of communication it is trying to 
have with the world around it. Is it the 
indignant protest of some dismembered tree 
ruthlessly cut down in the morning of life, 
that energetically but ineffectually sputters 
itself forth in the glowing heat? Perhaps 
if Gilbert White, or Thoreau, or Bur- 
roughs happened to fill my easy-chair at 
such a moment, this question might be 
answered ; I, in my ignorance, can only 
ask it. Of one thing I am certain, how- 
39 



ever: that when the fire falls into this 
humour it is quite likely to take Rosalind 
and myself with it ; on such occasions the 
quiet talk or the long, uninterrupted read- 
ing gives place to a discussion which is 
likely to be prolonged until the back-log 
falls in two and the ashes lie white and 
powdery around the expiring embers. Even 
then the pretty bellows which came several 
Christmases ago from one whose charm 
makes it impossible to use the word com- 
mon even to describe her friendship for 
Rosalind and myself, are vigorously used 
to give both fire and talk a few minutes' 
grace. 

It is generally concerning some fact or 
event which disturbs Rosalind's idealisa- 
tion of life that these discussions rise and 
flourish. This charming woman persists, 
for instance, in aeclining to take any 
account of traits and characteristics in 
eminent men of letters which impair the 
symmetry of the ideal literary life; with 
delightful feminine insistence, she will have 
her literary man a picturesque ideal, or else 
will not have him at all. For myself, on 
the other hand, I am rather attracted than 
40 




^ t 



repelled by the failings 
of great men; in their 
human limitations, their 
prejudices, their various 
deflections from the 
line of perfect living, I 

find the ties that link 

them to myself and to a hu- 
manity whose perfection is not 
only a vague dream of the ' 
future, but actually and for the < 
deepest reasons impossible. 
The faults of men of genius have been em- 
phasised, misrepresented, and exaggerated in 
a way that makes most writing about such 
men of no value to those who care for truth. 
The men are few in every age who can hon- 
estly and intelligently enter into and possess 
the life of a former time ; the men who can 
comprehend a human life that belongs to 
the past are fewer still. The writers who 
have been most active, radical, and influ- 
ential are those whose secret is most likely 
to escape the search of biographers and 
critics. Most of what has been written 
about such men, for instance, as Petrarch, 
Goethe, Voltaire, Heine, Carlyle, may be 
4i 



wisely consigned to that insatiable spirit of 
flame which devours falsehoods and crude, 
worthless stuff with the same appetite 
which it brings to the choicest books in 
the world. Men of genius are as much 
amenable to law as the meanest of their 
fellow- creatures, but the latter are not 
always the best interpreters of that law. 
English criticism owes Carlyle an immense 
debt for destroying the superstition that 
every man of letters must be brought to the 
bar of the Thirty-nine Articles; and criti- 
cism in this country is slow to learn from 
such spirits as Emerson the true standards 
and measures of greatness. For the most 
part, ignorance and stupid unbelief have 
waylaid and attempted to throttle those 
hardy spirits who have ventured to set foot 
in the Temple of Fame. 

Men of genius, as I often tell Rosalind, 
must always stand a very poor chance with 
the conventional people; the people, that 
is, who accept the traditional standards 
they find about them, and who live on the 
surface of things. It is the constant ten- 
dency of life, like the earth's crust, to cool 
off and harden ; it is the common task of 
42 



all men of original power to reverse this 
course of things. A good many men per- 
form this duty in a needlessly offensive 
manner; they lack the sound sense of 
Richter, who, when he found that his 
habit of omitting the omnipresent collar 
from his toilet set all tongues a-wagging, 
wisely concluded to conform to fashion in 
a trivial matter, in order that he might 
put his whole strength into a struggle on 
vital principles. And yet there is no rea- 
son why a great man should not indulge in 
his little idiosyncrasy if he chooses to ; 
surely intelligent men and women ought 
to be about better business than comment- 
ing on the length of Tennyson's hair or 
the roll of Whitman's coat. In a world 
in which so many people wear the same 
clothes, live in the same house, eat the 
same dinner, and say the same things, 
blessed are the individualities who are not 
lost in the mob, who have their own 
thoughts and live their own lives. The 
case of the man of genius can be put in a 
paragraph : the conventional people control 
society ; they can never understand him ; 
hence the cloud of misconception and 
43 



misrepresentation in which he lives and 
dies. To a man of sensitive temperament 
this process is often intensely painful ; to 
a man of virile temper it is often full of 
humorous suggestion. Gifted men take 
a certain satirical satisfaction in bringing 
into clear light the innocent ignorance of 
those whose every word of criticism or 
laudation betrayed a complete misconcep- 
tion. The charming old story of Sopho- 
cles's defence of himself by simply reading 
to the Athenian jury the exquisite choral 
ode on Colonos would sound apocryphal 
if told of a modern jury. The case of 
Carlyle furnishes a good illustration ; among 
all the mass of writing relating to this man 
of genius that has been poured upon a 
defenceless world, it is safe to say that one 
can count on the fingers of one hand the 
articles that have betrayed any real under- 
standing of the man. One readily under- 
stands, in the light of this and similar past 
records, the fervour with which Sir Henry 
Taylor reports Tennyson as saving that 
he thanked God with his whole heart and 
soul that he knew nothing, and that the 
world knew nothing, of Shakespeare but 
44 



his Avritings ! In these days a man of 
letters takes his life in his hand when he 
takes up his pen ; the curse of publicity 
which attaches itself not only to his work 
but to himself is as comprehensive as an 
Arab imprecation ; it covers his ancestry 
and his posterity with impartial maledic- 
tion. When such a dust from rude and 
curious feet has half suffocated one all his 
life, he must be ready to say with the 
Laureate : 

** Come not, when 1 am dead. 

To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave, 
To trample round my fallen head. 

And vex the unhappy dust thou wouldst 
not save. 
There let the wind sweep and the plover cry ; 
But thou, go by. 

" Child, if it were thine error or thy crime 
1 care no longer, being all unblest ; 
Wed whom thou wilt, but I am sick of Time, 

And 1 desire to rest. 
Pass on, weak heart, and leave me where 1 
lie — 

Go by, go by." 

There is a respect, a deference, a deep and 
vital affection, in which the true man of 

4S 



letters finds one of his sweetest and purest 
rewards ; the mind and heart which hospi- 
tably receive his truest thought and honour 
him for it must always command an an- 
swering glow of gratitude. It is the vulgar 
love of novelty, publicity, mere cleverness, 
from which the man of genius shrinks. 
Perhaps the bitterest experience in the 
life of the Teacher of Galilee was the 
eagerness with which the crowds looked 
for miracles, the apathv with which they 
listened to truth. Through the noise and 
roar of the shallow current of popular 
applause there runs for every genuine man 
of letters a deep, quiet current of intelli- 
gent sympathy and love which fertilises 
his life wherever it comes in contact with 
it. Of this true and honest homage to 
what is best and noblest in one's work, 
Sir Henry Taylor gives an illustration : '■'■ I 
met in the train yesterday a meagre, sickly, 
peevish-looking, elderly man, not affecting 
to be quite a gentleman . . . and on 
showing him the photographs of Lionel 
Tennyson which I carried in my hand, he 
spoke of ' In Memoriam,' and said he had 
made a sort of churchyard of it, and had 
46' 



appropriated some passage of it to each of 
his departed friends, and that he read it 
every Sunday, and never came to the 
bottom of the depths of it. More to be 
prized this, I thought, than the criticism 
of critics, however plauditory." 



47 




CHAPTER VI 



CHRISTMAS EVE 



E world has been full of mys- 
teries to-day; everybody has 
gone about weighted with 
secrets. The children's faces 
have fairly shone with expec- 
tancy, and I enter easily into 
the universal dream which at 
this moment holds all the children 
of Christendom under its spell. Was 
there ever a wider or more loving 
conspiracy than that which keeps 
the venerable figure of Santa Claus 
from slipping away, with all the other 
old-time myths, into the forsaken 
wonderland of the past ? Of all the 
personages whose marvellous doings 
once filled the minds of men, he 
survives. He has outlived all the 
great gods, and all the impressive and poetic 
48 



alone 



conceptions v/hich once flitted between 
heaven and earth ; these have gone, but 
Santa Claus remains by virtue of a com- 
mon understanding that childhood shall 
not be despoiled of one of its most cher- 
ished beliefs, either by the mythologist, 
with his sun-myth theory, or the scientist, 
with his heartless diatribe against super- 
stition. There is a good deal more to be 
said on this subject, if this were the place 
to say it ; even superstition has its uses, and 
sometimes its sound heart of truth. He 
who does not see in the legend of Santa 
Claus a beautiful faith on one side, and 
the naive embodiment of a divine fact on 
the other, is not fit to have a place at the 
Christmas board. For him there should 
be neither carol, nor holly, nor mistletoe; 
they onlv shall keep the feast to whom all 
th?se things are but the outward and visible 
signs of an inward and spiritual grace. 

Rosalind and myself are thoroughly 
orthodox when it comes to the keeping of 
holidays ; here at least the ways of our 
fathers are our ways also. Orthodoxy 
generally consists in retaining and empha- 
sising the disagreeable ways of the fathers, 

4 49 



and as we are both inclined to heterodoxy 
on these points, we make the more promi- 
nent our observance of the best of the old- 
time habits. I might preach a pleasant 
little sermon just here, taking as my text 
the " survival of the fittest," and illustrat- 
ing the truth from our own domestic 
ritual ; but the season preaches its own 
sermon, and I should only follow the 
example of some ministers and get between 
the text and my congregation if I made 
the attempt. For weeks we have all been 
looking forward to this eventful evening 
and the still more eventful morrow. There 
have been hurried and whispered confer- 
ences hastily suspended at the sound of a 
familiar step on the stair ; packages of 
every imaginable size and shape have been 
surreptitiously introduced into the house, 
and have immediately disappeared in all 
manner of out-of-the-way places ; and for 
several weeks past one room has been 
constantly under lock and key, visited only 
when certain sharp-sighted eyes were occu- 
pied in other directions. Through all this 
scene of mystery Rosalind has moved 
sedately and with sealed lips, the common 
5° 



confidant of all the conspirators, and her- 
self the greatest conspirator of all. Blessed 
is the season which engages the whole 
world in a conspiracy of love ! 

After dinner, eaten, let it be confessed, 
with more haste and less accompaniment 
of talk than usual, the parlour doors were 
opened, and there stood the Christmas tree 
in a glow of light, its wonderful branches 
laden with all manner of strange fruits not 
to be found in the botanies. The wild 
shouts, the merry laughter, the cries of 
delight as one coveted fruit after another 
dropped into long-expectant arms still 
linger in my ears now that the little tapers 
are burnt out, the boughs left bare, and 
the actors in the perennial drama are fast 
asleep, with new and strange bedfellows 
selected from the spoils of the night. 
Cradled between a delightful memory 
and a blissful anticipation, who does not 
envy them ? 

After this charming prelude is over, 
Rosalind comes into the study, and studies 
for the fortieth time the effect of the new 
design of decoration which she has this 
year worked out, and which gives these 

SI 



rather sombre rows of books a homelike 
and festive aspect. It pleases me to note 
the spray of holly that obscures the title 
of Bacon's solemn and weighty " Essays," 
and I get half 
a p a ee of 




t 



Ihe. Christmas, jj,^. 



i 



book from the tact that a sprig of mis- 
tletoe has fallen on old Burton's " Anat- 
omy of Melancholy." Rosalind has 
reason to be satisfied, and if I read her face 
aright she has succeeded even in her own 
eyes in bringing Christmas, with its fra- 
grant memories and its heavenly visions, 
into the study. I cannot help thinking, as 
I watch her piling up the fire for a blaze 
of unusual splendour, that if more studies 
had their Rosalinds to bring in the genial 
currents of life there would be more 
cheer and hope and large-hearted wisdom 
in the books which the world is reading 
to-day. 

When the fire has reached a degree of 
intensity and magnitude which Rosalind 
thinks adequate to the occasion, I take 
down a well-worn \ olume which opens of 
itself at a well-worn page. It is a book 
which I have read and re read many times, 
and always with a kindling sympathy and 
affection for the man who wrote it ; in 
whatever mood I take it up there is some- 
thing in it which touches me with a sense 
of kinship. It is not a great book, but it 
is a book of the heart, and books of the 
53 



heart have passed beyond the outer court 
of criticism before we bestow upon them 
that phrase of supreme regard. There are 
other books of the heart around me, but 
on Christmas Eve it is Alexander Smith's 
" Dreamthorp " which always seems to 
lie at my hand, and when I take it up the 
well-worn volume falls open at the essay 
on " Christmas." It is a good many years 
since Rosalind and I began to read together 
on Christmas Eve this beautiful meditation 
on the season, and now it has gathered 
about itself such a host of memories that 
it has become part of our common past. 
It is, indeed, a veritable palimpsest, over- 
laid with tender and gracious recollections 
out of which the original thought gains a 
new and subtle sweetness. As I read it 
aloud I know that she sees once more the 
familiar landscape about Dreamthorp, with 
the low, dark hill in the background, and 
over it " the tender radiance that precedes 
the moon " ; the village windows are all 
lighted, and the " whole place shines like 
a congregation of glowworms." There 
are the skaters still " leaning against the 
frosty wind " ; there is the " gray church 
54 




a>. 



,c 



'M-ir^'- 



In their Liest dresses and their best fac 



tower amid the leafless elms," around 
which the echojs ot the morning peal ot 
Christmas bells still hover ; tlie village 
folk have gathered, " in their best dresses 
and their best taces " ; the beautiful ser- 
vice ot the church has been read and 
answered with heartfelt 
responses, the familiar 
storv has been told again 
simply and urgently, with 
applications tor every 
thankful soul, and then 
the congregation has 
gone to its homes and its 
festivities. 

All these things, I am 
sure, lie within Rosalind's 
vision, although she 
seems to see nothing but the ruddy blaze 
of the fire ; all these things I see, as I 
have seen them these many Christmas 
Eves agone ; but with this familiar land- 
scape there are mingled all the sweet 
and sorrowful memories of our common 
life, recalled at this hour that the light 
of the highest truth may interpret them 
anew in the divine language of hope. 
55 




I read on until I come to the quotation 
from the " Hymn to the Nativity," and 
then I close the book, and take up a 
copy of Milton close at hand. We 
have had our commemoration service 
of love, and now there comes into our 
thought, with the organ roll of this sub- 
lime hymn, the universal truth which 
lies at the heart of the season. I am 
hardly conscious that it is my voice 
which makes these words audible : I am 
conscious only of this mighty-voiced an- 
them, fit for the choral song of the morn- 
ing stars : 

" Ring out, ye crystal spheres. 

And bless our human ears. 
If ye have power to touch our senses so ; 

And let your silver chime 

Move in melodious time ; 
And let the bass of heaven's deep organ blow ; 
And, with your ninefold harmony. 
Make up full concert to the angelic symphony. 

"For, if such holy song 
Enwrap our fancy long, 
Time will run back and fetch the age of gold ; 
And speckled vanity 
Will sicken soon and die. 
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould ; 
56 







9 


\^ 






- 1 








'"■^Ml 




. '-"^'l^nHBHMiH 


K 


I 


i^'v 




. ^Jjg 


^^; 


\ 


m^-.M ^' ".1 


^ifll ;■ 


M^J 




1*J 




"^ 


^ 




^ 


l» 




3»^ 


i 


t\ 




■ 


'^ 


P ■ 




■ 



And hell itself" will pass away. 

And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day. 



"The oracles are dumb. 
No voice or hideous hum 
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving ; 
Apollo from his shrine 
Can no more divine 
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. 
No nightlv trance or breathed spell 
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic 
cell. 

"The lonely mountains o'er. 
And the resounding shore, 
A voice of weeping heard and loud lament ; 
From haunted spring, and dale 
Edged with poplars pale. 
The parting genius is with sighing sent ; 
With flower-enwoven tresses torn. 
The nymphs in twilight shades of tangled 
thickets mourn." 



Like a psalm the great Hymn fills the 
air, and like a psalm it remains in the 
memory. The fire has burned low, and 
a soft and solemn light fills the room. 
Neither of us speaks while the clock 
57 



strikes twelve. I look out of the window. 
The heavens are ablaze with light, and 
somewhere amid those circling constella- 
tions I know that a new star has found its 
place, and is shining with such a ray as 
never before fell from heaven to earth. 



CHAPTER VII 




NEW YEAR'S EVE 

E last fire of many that 
have blazed on my hearth 
these twelve months gone 
is fast sinking into ashes. 
I do not care to revive its 
expiring flame, because I 
find its slow fading into 
darkness harmonious with the hour and 
the thought which comes with it as the 
shadow follows the cloud. While it is 
true that our division of time into years 
is purely conventional and finds no 
recognition or record on the great dial 
face of the heavens, no man can be quite 
oblivious of it. New Year's Eve is like 
every other night ; there is no pause in 
the march of the universe, no breathless 
moment of silence among created things 
that the passage of another twelve months 
may be noted ; and yet no man has quite 
59 



the same thoughts this evening that come 
with the coming of darkness on other 
nights. The vast and shadowy stream of 
time sweeps on without break, but the 
traveller who has been journeying with it 
cannot be entirely unmindful that he is 
perceptibly nearer the end of his wander- 
ings. It is an old story, this irresistible 
and ceaseless onflow of life and time ; 
time always scattering the flowers of life 
with a lavish hand along its course ; but 
each man recalls it for himself, and to each 
it wears some new aspect. The vision of 
Mirza never wholly fades from the sight 
of men. 




From such thoughts as these, which 
would be commonplace enough if it were 
not for the pathos in them, I am recalled 
by a singular play of the expiring flames 
on the titles of my books. Many of these 
are so indistinct that I cannot read them ; 
indeed, the farther corners of the room are 
lost entirely in the gloom that is fast gain- 
ing on the dying light. But there are two 
rows of books whose titles I discover 
readily as I sit before the fire, and I note 
that they are the great, vital works which 
belong to all races and times ; the books 
which form the richest inheritance of each 
new generation, and which the whole 
world has come to hold as its best posses- 
sion. In the deepening shadows, and at 
this solitary hour, there is something deeply 
significant, something solemn and consol- 
ing, in the great names which I read there. 
A multitude of other names, full of light 
and beauty in their time, have been 
remorselessly swept into oblivion by the 
fading of the light ; at this moment they 
are as utterly vanished as if they had never 
been. But these other names — and I 
note among them Homer, Dante, Shake- 



speare, Milton, Goethe, Cervantes — stand 
out clear and familiar amid even the 
shadows. 

I recall the old maxim of the English 
common law, that no time runs against 
the king, and I see at a glance the deep 
and wide meaning which escapes from the 
meshes of legal interpretation. Here truly 
are the kings, and to them time is as if it 
were not. It has run against the Greek 
race and the Greek language, but not 
against Homer; it has run against mediae- 
val Florence and the Italy just on the 
threshold of the Renaissance, but not 
against Dante ; it has run against the 
sturdy England of Elizabeth, but not 
against Shakespeare. All are dead save 
the kings, and when one remembers what 
they have outlived of power and wealth 
and learning and civilisation, one feels that 
here are the inheritors of immortality. A 
library is, more truly than any other place 
to which men mav go, a place of refuge 
agalrtst time. Not that time does not 
come here ; those forgotten names on the 
upper shelves bear witness to its power; 
but here, at least, are some whose serene 
62 



faces have the majesty of a work of 
Phidias; that large, cahn, penetrating look 
of immortality of the elder kings when 
they stood in unbroken line with the gods. 
Every library which has its poets' corner 
— and what library has not ? — possesses 
the memorials of royalty more truly than 
Westminster itself; more really, in fact, 
because these kings are not dead. They 
rule a mightier host to-day than ever 
before, and the boundaries of their com- 
mon realm are also the frontier lines of 
civilisation. In such company the passage 
of time is, after all, a thing of little account. 
It destroys only the imperfect, the partial, 
the limited, the transitory ; here are the 
truths over which time has no power, 
because they are part of that eternity to 
which it is itself tributary. And just here 
is the secret of the immortality which these 
kings have inherited ; they have passed 
through all the appearances of things, the 
passing symbols and the imperfect embodi- 
ments of truth to truth itself, which is 
contemporaneous with every age and race. 
Time destroys only the symbols and the 
inadequate expression of truth, but it is 
63 



r- 




powerless to touch truth. The writers 
who were once famous and now forgotten 
were men who caught the aspect of the 
hour and gave it graceful or forceful 
expression ; but when the hour passed, the 
book which grew out of it went with it as 
the flower goes with the season which saw 
its blossoming. The book of the moment 
often has immense vogue, while the book 
of the age, which comes in its company 
from the press, lies unnoticed ; but the 
great book has its revenge. It lives to see 
its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf 
until it finds its final resting-place in the 
garret or the auction room. 

The conviction deepens in me year by 
year that the best possible education which 
any man can acquire is a genuine and 
intimate acquaintance with these few great 
minds who have escaped the wrecks of 
time and have become, with the lapse of 
years, a kind of impersonal wisdom, sum- 
ming up the common experience of the 
race and distilling it drop,- 
by drop into the perfect 

•Ji forms of art. The man 

Ht, who knows his Homer 



wr-^ 




64 



thoroughly knows more 
about the Greeks than 
he who has familiarised him 
self with all the work of 
the archaeologist and philologist 
and historians of the Homeric age ; 
the man who has mastered Dante has 
penetrated the secret of mediaevalism ; 
the man who counts Shakespeare as 
his friend can aftord to leave most 
other books about P^lizabeth's England 
unread. To really know Homer, Dante, 
Shakespeare, and Goethe is to know 
the best the world has thought and said 
and done, is to enter into that inherit- 
ance of experience and knowledge which 
is the truest, and at bottom the only, edu- 
cation. A-lost of us know too many 
writers, and waste our strength in a vain 
endeavour to establish relations of intimacy 
with a multitude of men, great and small, 
who profess to have some claim upon us. 
It is both pleasant and wise to have a large 
acquaintance, to know life broadly and at 
its best; but our intimate friends can 
never, in the nature of things, be many. 
We may know a host of interesting peo- 
5 ' 65 




pie, but we can really live with but a 
few. And it is these few and faithful 
ones whose names I see in the dying 
light of the old year and the first fainr 
gleam of the new. 



66 




CHAPTER VIII 

A SCHOLAR'S DREAM 

K delicate hands of the little 

Clock on the mantel indicated 

that thirty minutes had passed 

since the musical chimes within 

had rung eleven. The open 

fire below was burning brightly, 

for the flame had eaten into 

the heart of the back log, and was 

transmuting its slow, rich growth 

into a warm glow that touched the 

outlines of the room with a soft 

splendour and made a charming 

picture of its mingled lights and 

shadows. The learning of the world 

rose tier above tier on the shelves 

that filled the space between floor 

and ceiling, and following the lines 

of gold lettering along the unbroken rows, 

one read august and imperial names in the 

67 



kingdom of thought. An ample writing- 
table, piled high with pamphlets ..nd books, 
stood in the centre of the room, and the 
loose sheets of paper carelessly thrown 
together gave evidence of a work only 
recently interrupted. Without, the solemn 
silence of midnight and the radiant stars 
brooded over the stainless fields, white 
with freshly fallen snow. 

Ralph Norton had been looking into the 
fire these thirty minutes in a meditation 
that was almost wholly pathetic. His 
seventy years passed in swift procession 
before him, coming up one by one out of 
the invisible past, and pronouncing an 
inaudible judgment upon his career. There 
was a presence of indefinable and unusual 
solemnity in the time, for it was the close 
of a century, and in a brief half-hour 
another hundred years would be rounded 
to completion. By the common judgment 
of the thinking world, Ralph Norton was 
the foremost man of his age ; no other 
had felt its doubts so keenly, or drank in 
its inspiration with such a mighty thirst as 
he. His thought had searched into its 
secret places and mastered all its wisdom ; 



his heart had felt its deep pulsations in the 
solitude of unbroken and heroic studies ; 
his genius had given its spirit a voice of 
matchless compass and eloquence. For 
half a century the world had laid his words 
to heart, and built its faith upon his think- 
ing. While the busy tides of activity 
ebbed and flowed through the great 
channels of civilisation, he had lived apart 
in a deep, earnest, and whole-hearted con- 
secration to truth. The clearly cut feat- 
ures, the keen, benignant eyes, the noble 
poise of head, the wistful expression as of 
one striving to pierce the heart of some 
mystery, were signs of a personality that 
had left its impress on two generations, and 
now, in its grand maturity, was still wait- 
ing for some larger fulfilment of the promise 
of life. Behind him, among the throng 
of books, indistinguishable in the dim light, 
were the works into which the life of 
his life had gone. They recorded ex- 
plorations into many fields, they had torn 
down old faiths amid storms of discus- 
sion and condemnation, they had laid new 
foundations for belief in the silence of 
meditative and self-forgetful years. The 
69 



strength and the weakness of the age had 
written themselves upon those pages, in 
the ebbing of inherited belief and the in- 
flow of convictions born out of new insight 
into and new contact with the experiences 
of life. 

The old man sat motionless, with his 
eyes fixed on the slow moving hands ; he 
seemed to be numbering the brief moments 
of his unfinished career. The century 
which had spoken through him was ebbing 
to its last second, and as it sank silentlv 
into the gulf of years his own thought 
seemed to pause in its daring flight, his 
own voice to sink into silence. The age 
and its master had done their work, and 
now, in the dim light of a room over 
which the spirit of the one had brooded and 
in which the brain and hand of the other 
had wrought, they were about to separate. 
The delicate hands moved on without 
consciousness of the mighty life whose 
limits they were fast registering, the stars 
looked down from the eternity in which 
they shone unmindful of the change from 
era to era, the world of men was remote 
and unconscious ; the old man was alone 
70 



with the sinking fire and the passing 
century. The minute hand moved on, 
the fire flashed up fitfully and sank down 
in ashes, there was a moment of hush, and 
then slowly and solemnly the chimes in 
the little clock rang twelve. Norton 
shivered as if a sudden chill had struck 
him, and peal on peal through the mid- 
night air the bells rang in a new century. 

The man who had worked as few men 
work, and yet had shown no sign of break- 
ing, felt strangely old in a moment, and 
the carol of the bells, flinging across the 
hills their jubilant welcome of the new 
time, struck on his inner ear like a requiem 
for a past that was irrevocably gone. In 
an instant life lost its familiar and home- 
like aspect, the impalpable presence of the 
new century rose like a vast empty house 
through which no human feet had walked, 
in which no human hearts had beat, over 
which no atmosphere of hope and love and 
dear old usage hung warm and genial. 
Norton had become a stranger ; his citi- 
zenship had gone with the age which had 
conferred it; his friendships seemed dim 
and ghostly, like myths out of which the 
71 



currents of life had ebbed. With a sink- 
ing heart, groping like one suddenly be- 
come blind for some familiar thing, he 
turned and looked at the row of books 
behind him upon whose covers his name 
was stamped. In the receding world that 
was swiftly moving away from him they 
alone remained faithful. 

" My life is but a breath," he said, as 
his eye fell upon them ; " but thought does 
not die, and here I have written my own 
immortality. Here is the record of all 1 
have felt and thought and done. These 
books are myself; and though I perish I 
live again." 

The old man's eye ran down the line, 
and recalled, as it fell upon volume after 
volume, how each had grown into being. 
Here were books of keen, open-eyed, and 
tireless observation, into which had gone 
years of unbroken study of external life, 
with such fruitful results as come to the 
man of trained faculty, of deep insight, 
and of heroic patience. Here were works 
of daring speculation that had traversed 
the whole realm of knowledge and struck 
luminous lines of order through many an 
72 



outlying darkness. Upon these volumes 
iVorton's eye rested with peculiar delight ; 
those which had gone before were only 
his careful reports of the world without 
him, these were the mighty lines into 
which he had put his meditations on the 
problems of the universe ; these were the 
utterance of his ripest thought, the fruitage 
of his best hours, the outcome of his long 
training, his laborious studies, his whole 
thoughtful life. In these books he knew 
that the vanished century had written itself 
most deeply and truly. Here were the 
eloquent lines in which its very soul 
seemed to burn with self-revealing splen- 
dour ; here were its aflirmations and its 
negations ; here was, in a word, the sum 
and substance of that individual thought, 
spirit, sentiment, which made it different 
from the centuries that went before and 
would forever keep it distinct and apart 
from the centuries that were to follow. 

At the end of the shelf was a thin 
volume, modest, unpretentious, almost 
trivial beside the greater works around 
it. The light of pride faded out of the 
old man's eyes when they rested upon this 

73 



little book, and a deep, unutterable pathos 
filled them with unshed tears. There had 
been one year of his prosperous life when 
the light of the sun was darkened and the 
beauty of the heavens overhung with 
clouds ; one year when his habits of 
investigation had been cast aside; when 
thinking mocked him with its insufficiency 
and the search for truth seemed idle and 
unreal ; one year when the sorrows of his 
own heart rolled like billows o\'er the 
pursuits of his mind, over the aims of his 
career, and rose until they threatened the 
whole universe in which he lived. He 
ceased to observe, to speculate, and only 
felt, l^he training of the schools, the 
long discipline of his maturity, the gifts 
and acquisitions of which lifted him above 
his fellow, seemed to vanish out of his 
life and left him only human ; he was one 
with the vast throng about him who were 
toiling, loving, suffering, and dying under 
all the manifold experiences of humanity. 
In that year there was much that was 
sacred and incommunicable, much that 
had receded into the silence of his deeper 
self; but months later, when the agony of 
74 



grief had spent itself and the passion and 
bitterness had gone, while the heart was 
yet tender and tremulous with sympathy, 
this little book had been born. It was a 
transcription of experience ; there were 
training, culture, deep thought on every 
page, but these were fused, vitalised, 
humanised by suffering, by struggle, by 
aspiration. It was a chapter out of living 
history ; the mind of the universe was there 
in hint and suggestion of bold thought, 
but the heart of the universe was still 
more truly there in hushed pulsations. 

Norton rose from his chair and took the 
book from its place on the shelf. Its 
covers were worn as if with much hand- 
ling, its pages bore evidence of frequent 
reading, and as the leaves fell apart in his 
hand tender and sorrowful memories came 
back to the lonely old man with a strange 
pathos. He held the worn book almost 
reverently, the music of unforgotien years 
sounded again in his soul, buried hope'^ 
rose from their sepulchres and were radiant 
with life and promise as of old, love that 
had been groping and waiting in the shad- 
ows of eternity these many years once more 
75 





had vision of vanished faces, and all the 
sweet use and habit of happy days returned 
with their precious ministries. Norton 
opened page after page of the past as he 
turned page after page of the little book. 

" The world cares little for this," he 
said to himself at last, as he returned it to 
its place ; " this is only for me ; time will 
76 



leave it with the age which saw its birth, 
as a thing too trivial and personal to be 
carried on the march." 

Then he sat down once more, gathered 
the few coals together, blew them into a 
little glow, and rekindled the dead fire. 
The bells had long been silent, and the 
first hour of the new age was already 
spent. The old man watched the fire as 
it rose cheerfully out of the ashes of the 
earlier burning, receiving the touch of 
flame from it and then sending out its 
own new glow and heat. Out of this 
simple process, which he had watched a 
thousand times before, a truth seemed to 
take form and project itself far on into the 
coming time. The past slowly drifted 
out of his thought, which moved forward 
as if to discover what lay behind the veil 
of the future. The low, monotonous 
ticking of the little clock became, in his 
ears, the audible pulsations of time. At 
first the beats were slow and far apart ; but 
as he listened they seemed to multiply, 
the minutes swiftly lengthened into hours, 
the hours ran into years, and the years 
moved on silently into centuries. 

77 



Almost without surprise Norton felt 
that two centuries hatl gone. He turned 
from the fire on which his gaze had been 
fixed and looked about the room. It was 
still the working room of a man of letters, 
but it was strangely changed. Books rose 
as formerly from floor to ceiling in un- 
broken ranks; but Norton, whose knowl- 
edge of literature had been so exact and 
comprehensive, knew barely one of the 
names stamped on the backs. His eve 
ran anxiously along the titles, and when it 
rested upon a familiar name he found but 
a tithe of the works which he had once 
known. Here and there a solitary volume 
greeted him like a friend in a crowd of 
strange faces. He searched for books 
that had been his hourly companions, and 
discovered only here and there a single 
thin volume, the sole residuum of a system 
of thought. With a pathetic interest he 
read the names that were meaningless to 
him, and taking down one of the strange 
volumes opened it at random. The first 
sentence that met his eye was a quotation 
from himself, the second commented upon 
his thought as an illustration of the crude 
78 




He read the first page carefully, and with a growing confusion of thought. 



methods and untrust^vorthy results of earlier 
observers. " The writer from whom I 
have quoted," the author went on to say, 
" was a man whose integrity of mind was 
unquestioned by his contemporaiies and 
must be undoubted bv us, but, in the light 
of later research, it is difficult to under- 
stand how so keen an intellect could have 
mistaken so entirely the evident teaching 
of fact." Norton closed the book with a 
sinking heart. The theory held up as a 
conspicuous error was one upon which he 
had spent years of thought, and upon 
which his fame had largely rested. 

He took down another volume and 
opened it also at random. He read the 
first page carefully, and with a growing 
confusion of thought. There were sen- 
tences which he could understand, but the 
page was incomprehensible to him. He 
read it more slowly and with an instinctive 
perception that it was a piece of close 
reasoning, but its meaning wholly eluded 
him. He caught glimpses of it and then 
it slipped away into mystery again. The 
writer's standpoint was so novel that he 
could not readily reach it j natural pro- 
79 



cesses and forces were suggested of which 
he was entirely ignorant. He opened 
book after book with the same result ; a 
feeling of unutterable solitude came over 
him as it slowly dawned upon him that 
two centuries intervened between his 
thought and that of the men whose works 
were gathered around him. He was an 
alien in an age which had no place for 
him; a stranger in a world out of which 
all familiar objects had vanished. 

At last he remembered his own work, 
and searched eagerly from case to case for 
the books into which he had poured the 
wealth of his mental life. Not a single 
volume was there, and the old thinker 
turned away with a despairing sigh. 

" With all my conscience, my self- 
denial, mv toil, I lived in vain," he said to 
himself. Then, feeling for a moment the 
force of an old habit, he drew a chair up 
to the writing-table and sat down. He 
grew more and more confused ; the very 
titles on the pamphlets scattered over the 
table were incomprehensible to him. He 
glanced at the fire, and its flames were 
strange; they were fed by some material 
80 



unknown to him ; the old fiimiliar world 
had drifted hopelessly away. 

Upon the writing-table lay a little 
volume with a few freshly written sheets 
folded between its pages. Norton opened 
the book mechanically, and then, with a 
suddenly aroused interest, turned quickly 
from page to page. The sight of the 
words was like the sound of a familiar 
voice in the darkness, or the opening of a 
window upon some familiar landscape. 
A soft light came into his eyes, and his 
face flushed with inexpressible happiness. 
The little book was his own thought and 
speech ; not the outcome of his specula- 
tion and research, but the utterance of his 
one year of deep interior life. He glanced 
through it lovingly as one would read the 
soul of a friend, catching here and there 
some well-remembered sentence, some 
word stamped in the fire of his great trial, 
some phrase wrung out of his very soul. 
It mattered little to him now that the 
great works out of which he had thought 
to build an earthly immortality had van- 
ished ; this deepest and truest word of his 
soul, this most vital and genuine outcome 



of his life, had survived the touch of time 
and still spoke to a living generation. As 
he turned from page to page the loose 
sheets slipped from the book upon the 
table. They had evidently been recently 
written, and seemed to be personal reflec- 
tions rather than any formal composition. 

" I have come to a place in my life," 
said the unknown writer, " from which I 
look back upon the past as one looks over 
a long course from the summit that com- 
mands it all. I have attained a great age 
and srcat honours, as the world counts 
honours, knowing perfectly that achieve- 
ments are relative, not positive, and that I 
am simply less ignorant, not more learned, 
than my fellows. I find myself every- 
where spoken of and written about as the 
first man of the age, its voice, prophet, 
interpreter, and what not, with a keen 
sense of the poverty of a century that can 
read its deepest thought in aught that I 
have said or written. I have given my 
life to the search for truth ; I have trav- 
elled here and there for new outlooks; I 
have withdrawn into deep seclusions for 
new insights ; I have questioned all the 



sciences that have grown to such vast 
proportions, and tell us so fully and so 
accurately of the methods of being, hut 
leave us as much in the dark as ever con- 
cerning its secret; 1 have drank deep at 
the fountains of ancient learning ; I have 
studied all literatures and looked long and 
earnestly into the soul of man in the reve- 
lation of books. In a word, I have trav- 
ersed the whole world of knowledge, and 
now, at the summit of mv years, with such 
rewards as the reverence of all men can 
give me, I return to the point whence I 
set out. The universe still sweeps beyond 
me vaster and remoter for all my struggle 
to master it, the illimitable abysses are 
more awful because I have looked into 
them, the mvstery of life is more insoluble 
because I have striven to pierce it. I have 
simplv learned to live my own personal 
life with fortitude, patience, and trust. 

" In my youth I came upon this little 
book, and was deeply moved by the dis- 
closure of a suffering soul I found in it, by 
its unforced and unstudied depth of feeling, 
by the intensity of its humanity, by its 
agony, its love, and its faith. I learned it 
83 



almost by heart, and then I passed on into 
studies and speculations which seemed to 
dwarf it by their vastness. But I come 
back again to the goal from which I set 
out, to the guide who first opened the 
depths of my life, and who, through his 
own suffering, found the pathway into the 
heart of the mystery which I have missed 
in all my searching. When I remember 
how earnestly men have striven to think 
their way into the secrets of the universe, 
and how certainly they have failed, I see 
clearly that only he who li\'es into truth 
finds it, and that love alone is immortal." 

Here the writing ended, and Norton 
felt himself in the presence of a mind as 
great and as sincere as his own. He 
replaced the loose sheets in the volume 
and laid the little book in its place; in his 
iov that anv impulse from his own heart 
had touched and inspired another across 
the gulf of years he had found the true 
immortality. The fire had burned out, 
and as he bent over it to find some live 
coal among the ashes, the little clock' on 
the mantel chimed two, and with a start 
he found himself in his own study. 
84 




Under some spell of silence. 




CHAPTER IX 

A FLAME OF DRIFTWOOD 

E have been sitting to- 
night before a fire of 
driftwood, and, as 
the many - coloured 
flames have shot up, 
flickered, and gone 
out, thought has made all manner of va- 
grant journeyings. Rosalind has occasion- 
ally commented on some splendid tongue 
of fire, but for the most part we have been 
silent. There are nights — nodes am- 
bros'iance — when inspiring talk, that nectar 
of the gods, has held us long and made 
us reluctant to cover the smouldering em- 
bers. There are other nights when we 
fall under some spell of silence, and the 
world without us stirs into strange vivid- 
ness the world within, and the chief im- 
portance of things visible and tangible 
seems to be their power to loosen thought 
8S 



and set it free to spread ifs wings in the 
empyrean. When one falls into this mood 
and sits slippered and at case before the 
crooning fire, while the wintry winds are 
trumpeting abroad, one easily comprehends 
the charm of Oriental mysticism ; the 
charm of unbroken silence in which one 
pursues and at last overtakes himself. 
The world has vanished like a phantasma- 
goria ; duties and cares and responsibilities 
have gone with the material relations and 
pursuits which gave them birth ; one is 
alone with himself, and within the invisible 
horizons of his own thought all mysteries 
are hidden and revealed. I have often 
thought that if I ever turn heretic I shall 
be a fire-worshipper. These volatile flames 
have immense powers of disintegration ; 
one can imagine the visible universe crum- 
bling into ashes at their touch. But when 
they dance before the eye the disintegration 
they effect has something of the miracle 
of creation in it ; so alive does the imagi- 
nation become when this glow touches it, 
so swift is thought to pursue and overtake 
that which entirely eludes it by the light 
of day ! I can hardly imagine myself 



sitting motionless in broad daylight, in the 
ambroken calm of an anticipated Nirvana ; 
but I can easily fancy myself under the 
perpetual spell of the fire spirit dreaming 
forever of worlds in which I have never 
lived. 

The peculiar fascination of a driftwood 
fire is partly material and partly imagina- 
tive. The brilliancy of the flame, the 
unexpected transformations of colour, the 
swift movement of the restless waves of 
fire from log to log, the sudden splendour 
of hue breaking out of smoky blackness — 
all these material features supplement the 
unfailing association of the fagots them- 
selves. They have no audible speech to 
report their journeyings, but the tropical 
richness of the flame which consumes them 
hints at all manner of strange wanderings 
in remote and strange parts of the earth. 
The secret of the sea where it breaks, 
phosphorescent, on the islands of the 
equator, seems to be hiding itself within 
those weird, bewildering flames. One 
feels as if he were near the mystery of 
that vast, dim life of the great seas so alien 
from all save the kindred solitariness and 
87 



majesty of the heavens; one feels as if 
something deeper and stranger than artic- 
ulate life were revealing itself before him, 
if he but had the wit to understand it. 
This vast, silent world which girdles our 
little world of speech and action, as the 
great seas hold some island locked in their 
immeasurable wastes — is it not this sub- 
lime background of mystery which gives 
our books, our art, our achievements, their 
deepest and most pathetic meaning ? One 
lays down a great book with a penetrating 
sense of its inadequacy. Judged by any 
human standard, we recognise its noble 
completeness ; but measured against the 
world of suffering which it portrays, how 
like a solitary star it shines out of gulfs of 
impenetrable darkness ! Scholars are still 
discussing the problem which Shakespeare 
presented in " Hamlet " ; but as one takes 
up the tragedy in some moment of deeper 
insight and becomes suddenly conscious in 
his own thought of its deeper significance, 
becomes suddenly aware of the outlying 
gloom in which the poet's torch is swal- 
lowed up, how small the question of real 
or feigned insanity becomes ! The slow 



transformation of purpose into action has 
never been more completely or more mar- 
vellously told than in " The Ring and the 
Book." Never before have the secret 
processes of different minds been studied 
with such intensity of insight and brought 
to light with such vividness and splendour 
of expression. But when Count Guido 
and Pompilia and Caponsacchi and the 
Pope have each told their story, is it not 
the finest result of Browning's art that the 
pathos of the tragedy oppresses us as 
something still unexpressed, something 
essentially inexpressible .' The secret of 
every great work of art is its power to 
send the imagination to search for itself 
in the dim world out of which it comes, 
never as a perfect creation, but always as 
a witness to the existence of something 
greater than itself. Our noblest words 
and works are to the great realities which 
they strive to reveal what the text-books 
of astronomy are to the immeasurable 
heavens of which they speak. It would 
be a poor world if any genius of man 
could fathom it and any language of man 
express it ! 



As the driftwood fire flickers and dances, 
I seem to feel about nic the vast, dim seas 
whose hidden splendour it has brought into 
my study, and touched the oldest books 
with a new association, with a deep and 
strange suggestiveness. How imperfect 
are the most famous of these transcrip- 
tions of the soul and the wonderful world 
through which it travels ; and yet how 
marvellouslv true and deep they are ! Like 
these fagots, carelessly gathered on the 
beach, they have caught the secret of the 
fathomless deeps, and thcv are touched 
with a beauty not their own. 




CHAPTER X 

DREAM WORLDS 

^ OSALIND is not always quite 
I sure that my occupations are 
entirely profitable. I notice at 
times an uncertain expression 
in her face when she finds 
me brooding over some 
old myth for hours to- 
gether. I am conscious of a disapproval 
which is rarely expressed, but which is 
none the less unmistakable in a nature so 
unflinching!)' and uncompromisingly honest. 
1 do not mean that Rosalind has no liking 
for fables or old legends. On the contrary, 
I have heard her read the " Tanglewood 
Tales " and " Wonder Book " so many 
times to the children that I associate cer- 
tain clear tones of her voice and certain 
characteristic accentuations with passages 
in the story of Midas and of Perseus. Rosa- 
lind's doubt is in regard to the great value 
91 



which I attach to these venerable fictions, 
and to the very considerable time I often 
devote to them. Last night, after I had 
given the fire a critical examination, and 
had settled back again in mv chair to 
further reading of a new and fascinating 
book of popular tales, I noticed the faint- 
est possible scepticism in Rosalind's face. 
Rosalind sometimes permits herself to 
suspect that I am wasting a day, and I 
fear there are occasional grounds for such 
a suspicion. There aie days when the 
mind refuses to be put to any service ; it 
lounges about according to its mood, and 
yields neither to persuasion nor to com- 
mand. At such times I find myself 
obliged to keep my mind company, and I 
have no sense of responsibility for wasted 
time. 

I am by no means certain that such 
days are lost ; I am rather of opinion that 
they are days of special fertility, and that 
the mind comes back from its wanderings 
quickened and enriched by new contacts 
with life and truth. While Goldsmith 
was playing his flute for rustic dances in 
French villages, he was storing up impres- 
92 



sions and experiences that were to add a 
flavour to all his later work. But this 
reaction of the mind against routine, or 
against work of any kind, is not so much 
what 1 am thinking about now as that 
kind of fruitful dreaming out of which 
myths, legends, and imaginary creations 
of all sorts spring. It is surprising to find 
how many of the greatest works of litera- 
ture have their roots in this withdrawal 
from the actual in order that the ideal may 
be approached and possessed. Last even- 
ing, when I noticed the faint touch of 
scepticism on Rosalind's face, I was quite 
ready to defend myself; in fact, that 
charming woman often tells me that I 
defend myself when no attack is intended ; 
and this, I have no doubt, she recognises 
as a slight stirring of conscience on my 
part, and so receives fresh confirmation of 
her suspicions. I long ago recognised the 
fact that, as all roads lead to Rome, so do 
all devices end in disaster when the woman 
who knows one best is concerned. Peter 
the Great finally learned the secret of 
victory at the hands of the foes who so 
long defeated him ; but in the peaceful 
93 



warfare which I have in mind, he is the 
wisest man who learns soonest that defeat 
is inevitable, and that resignation is the 
single flower that blooms on these well- 
contested fields. There are times when 
victory seems assured ; one is armed at all 
points, and has made the most careful dis- 
position of his forces. The enemy seems 
to have a foreboding of defeat ; there is a 
lack of spirit in her resistance ; she soon 
yields and draws one on, careless and 
confident. Suddenly there is a portentous 
change ; the right wing is turned and 
flying, the left wing follows suit ; the 
centre is seized with sudden panic, and 
gives way at the first attack. The reserve 
is brought up, and promptly routed, and 
one retires at last from the field, not 
sullen, but dazed, confused, and hopelessly 
perplexed. By everv known law of mili- 
tary science he ought to have held his 
ground and routed the foe ; his arguments 
were overpowering, his facts invincible ; 
nevertheless he is a solitary fugitive. Those 
who have not gone through the experience 
will doubt this record of it ; those who 
have passed through its varied phases will 
94 



instantly recognise its fidelity to nature, 
and will decline to confirm it ; there is a 
conspiracy of silence on this subject among 
those who have fallen victims to rash con- 
fidence in their powers. It must be added 
that nothing can exceed the delicacy of 
behaviour on the part of the victor on such 
occasions. It is only by a little increase 
of colour, an irrepressible light in the eye, 
that the consciousness of success is be- 
trayed. Friendly relations are immediately 
resumed, and one is even deluded into the 
conviction that his defeat was more appar- 
ent than real, and that in disaster his own 
greatness has become more evident, and 
been instantly recognised. This is a 
delightful feeling, and it survives as long 
as it remains unexpressed. 

This is a long digression, but an open 
fire sings as many tunes as one has moods, 
and I make no apology for rambling from 
my subject. At that very moment Goethe's 
" Autobiography " lay open in Rosalind's 
lap; I gently disentangled it from some of 
that ornamental work which fringes all a 
woman's occupations, and read the legend 
of the poet's youth which he calls " The 
95 



New Paris." Goethe learned very early 
to tell stories acceptably ; he came natur- 
ally by an art in which his mother excelled, 
of whom he says — 

"Von Miitterchen die Frohnatur 
Und Lust zu fabuliren." 

His playfellows were constantly entertained 
by the recitals of his marvellous adventures, 
and they were delighted especially with his 
report of a certain garden into which he 
found his way through a gate in the city 
walls, and within whose magical boundaries 
all manner of strange things were seen by 
the adventurous boy. This was told so 
often and with such circumstantiality that 
it was accepted as fact not only by the 
listeners, but by the narrator himself. 
Each boy privately visited the part of the 
wall where the gate was supposed to be, 
and each found confirmation of the story. 
There were even warm discussions as to 
the exact position of certain wholly imagi- 
nary things which each one had seen. 

Every one who has the privilege of 
being intrusted with the confidences of 
children knows that the imagination has an 
96 




W^m^fm^Sk 



equal power with reality over them. They 
make imaginary or dream worlds, and sus- 
tain them by an unbroken faith until the 
light of knowledge slowly and sadly dis- 
integrates them. The mind dreams, and 
creates worlds out of its dreams, as natu- 
rally and as inevitably as it observes and 
learns real things. 

It is not surprising that a kinsman of 
one of the greatest dreamers of modern 
times should have been the architect of 
one of these ideal worlds. Hartley Cole- 
ridge believed fully that some day a stream 
would break out of the soil of a neighbour- 
ing meadow, and that along its swiftly 
created banks a new race would find its 
home and a new life organise itself. This 
was no vague dream ; it was so real, so 
definite, and so continuous that the boy 
knew its geography as well as that of the 
country about it, and even made an accu- 
rate map of it. This secret possession of 
Hartley's imagination was shared by his 
brother Derwent, and for years the two 
boys watched the growth of nations on 
this invisible continent, the evolution of 
national institutions, religions, and laws j 
7 97 



thev were spectators of battles and civic 
conflicts ; they knew the private histories 
of the great generals and statesmen who 
arose from time to time ; and in the long 
course of years they saw radical and far- 
reaching changes of government and 
society. Everybody remembers the ideal 
empire of Gombroon which De Quincey 
ruled in his youth, and the government of 
which, in an evil hour, he divided with 
his elder brother. The latter took such an 
aggressive attitude toward the people of 
Gombroon that the younger ruler was 
obliged to make a long and desperate 
struggle to preserve their independence. 
Things at length came to such a pass that, 
in order to defeat the machinations of an 
unscrupulous enemy, the creator of the 
invisible empire had to face the question 
of destroying it. " Ah, but no ! I had 
contracted obligations to Gombroon; I 
had submitted my conscience to a yoke, 
and in secret truth my will had no such 
autocratic power. Long contemplation 
of a shadow, earnest study for the welfare 
of that shadow, sympathy with the wounded 
sensibilities of that shadow under accumu- 
98 



lated wrongs — these bitter experiences, 
nursed by brooding thought, had gradually 
frozen that shadow into a rigour of reality 
far denser than the material realities of 
brass or granite." 

Such records of imaginative childhood 
as these might be multiplied indefinitely ; 
they register not so much isolated activities 
as an inevitable and normal stage of devel- 
opment. It is a theory of mine that child- 
hood contains in the germ all that maturity 
ever develops or displays, and I find par- 
ticular illustration of this in the persistence 
and splendour with which this faculty of 
ideal creation has worked in the literature 
of the world. For instance 
it occurs to me just 
here that I have 
wholly fiuled to 
report the dis- 
cussion between 
Rosalind and 
myself which 
arose when I 
laid down the 
poker and settled 
back in the easy- 

99 




chair. I think it wisest, upon the whole, 
to leave that conversation unrecorded, but 
I hope no one will connect this de- 
cision on my part with what I have 
written in a strictly general way about 
such discussions. 



CHAPTER XI 




A TEXT FROM SIDNEY 

V OSALIND has given me a text 
this evening. She u^as reading 
Sidney's " Defence of Poesy," 
and, as a contribution to a talk 
we had been ha\ ing on 
poetry, she read these 
words aloud : " Since, 
then, poetry is of all human learnings the 
most ancient and of most fatherly antiquity, 
as from whence other learnings have taken 
their beginnings ; since it is so universal 
that no learned nation doth despise it, nor 
barbarous nation is without it ; since both 
Roman and Greek gave such divine names 
unto it, the one of prophesying, the other 
of making, and that indeed that name of 
making is fit for it, considering, that where 
all other arts retain themselves within their 
subject, receive, and as it were, their being 
from it, the poet only, only bringeth 




his own stuff, and doth not learn a con- 
ceit out of a matter, but maketh matter 
for a conceit ... I thinic, and think 
I think rightly, the laurel crown appointed 
for triumphant captains doth worthily, 
of all other learnings, honour the poet's 
triumph." These were familiar words, 
but they fitted my mood so perfectly 
that I seemed to be hearing them for the 
first time. I had spent the whole day in 
a world which a great poet had formed out 



of the stuff of his imagination ; a world 
subUniely ordered, as I looked into it, by 
the harmony of the imagination and the 
practical reason ; the one building out of 
unsubstantial thought and touching with a 
bewildering and elusive beauty, the other 
moulding the structure to human needs and 
shaping it to human ends. The day made 
some escape from its sombre realities almost 
inevitable. Since early morning the rain 
had fallen ceaselesslv, with a melancholy 
monotone that beat on one's heart. Even 
the cheerful notes of the fire, singing lustily 
as if to exorcise the demon of gloom and 
ennu'i^ failed to shut out the steady murmui 
of the water falling from the leaden skies. 
Against such invasions of darkness there is 
always a refuge in the imagination, and I 
fled early to that nameless island in the 
undiscovered sea where Shakespeare's 
" Tempest " finds its sublime stage. 
Under the spell of this magical vision I 
had forgotten lowering skies and leaden- 
footed hours, and I was still in Shakes- 
peare's world when Rosalind read the 
words from the '•'• Defence of Poesy " 
which I have quoted. 
103 



I had but to stretch my hand to a shelf 
at my side to match the immortal young 
Elizabethan with the deeper eloquence of 
the Greek thinker whose speculations so 
often lead into the fields of poetry. It is 
to the well-worn words of Socrates to Ion 
that I open and read : " As the Coryban- 
tian revelers, when they dance, are not in 
their right mind, so the lyric poets are not 
in their right mind when they are compos- 
ing their beautiful strains : but when fall- 
ing under the power of music and metre 
they are inspired and possessed, like 
Bacchic maidens who draw milk and 
honey from the rivers when they are under 
the influence of Dionysus, but not when 
they are in their right mind. And the 
soul of the lyric poet does the same, as 
they themselves tell us ; for they tell us 
that they gather their strains from honeyed 
fountains out of the gardens and dells of 
the Muses ; thither, like the bees, they 
wing their way. And this is true. For 
the poet is a light and winged and holy 
thing, and there is no invention in him 
until he has been inspired, and is out of 
his senses, and the mind is no longer 



in him. . . . For in this way the God 
would seem to indicate to us, and not 
allow us to doubt that these beautiful 
poems are not human or the work of 
man, but divine and the word of God; 
and that the poets are only the interpre- 
ters of the gods by whom they are sev- 
erally possessed." 

One needs nowadays to reinforce his 
faith in the ancient supremacy of the 
imagination by some such words as these 
from those masters of the higher reason 
who have established the reality of their 
faith by the sublimity and substance of 
their works. It is as idle to question the 
authority of the imagination in the presence 
of Shakespeare's " Tempest," or Plato's 
" Ion " or " Phsdo," as to dispute the 
reality of music while Beethoven's " I'ifth 
Symphony " or Wagner's " Tristan and 
Isolde " hold us silent and responsive to 
we know not what unspoken messages 
from some vaster world. It is not a 
matter of demonstration, of evidence or 
proof or logical deduction ; it is always and 
only a flash of intelligence through the 
spiritual sense. Well says Abt Vogler in 
los 



Robert Browning's vvoiulcrful exposition 
of the whole matter : — 

*• Why rushed the discords on, but tliat harnionv 
should be pri/.ed ? 
Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to 
clear ; 
Each sufferer says his sav, his scheme of 
the weal and the woe ; 
But God has a few of us whom he whispers 
in the ear ; 
The rest may reason, and welcome ; 't is 
we musicians know." 

Literary epochs come and go, forms of 
expression change, but the method of the 
true poet remains the same ; he does not 
reason — he sees, he hears, he knows. 
The reality of the Ideal, of the Spiritual, 
is never an open question with him ; when 
it becomes one he ceases to be a poet. 
Scepticism which stimulates science blights 
poetry ; the doubt which sends the mind 
restlessly abroad destroys in the same 
moment the home in which are the sources 
of its joy and its inspiration. Nothing in 
life is quite so pathetic as the artist who 
clings to his work after he has begun to 
io6 



question its authority and validity. The 
toil remains, but the unspeakable joy of it 
is gone ; and so also is that chance of 
possible perfection for the winning of which 
genius never hesitates to stake its all. It 
were better that the painters who doubt 
whether it is worth while to paint, and the 
musicians who question the sincerity of 
their art, and the poets who are haunted 
with the fear that the day of verse has gone, 
should refrain from all endeavour, and that 
J the world should wait for the 
hands and the voices that must 
bring back the Ideal once more 
as certainly as the birds 
of April will announce the 
summer, coming swiftly 
northvv^ard with leaf for 
tree, and flower for stalk, 
and green for brown, and 
the splendour of overflow- 
ing light for days that are 
brief and shadowed. It is 
easy to deny the existence 
of that which one does not 
and cannot see, and this 
must be the cloak of 



'K 






charity which one casts over those who 
write the epitaph of the Imagination and 
record with funereal reiteration the decline 
and disappearance of poetry. Thev do not 
write poetry: therefore poetry has ceased to 
be. Its sublime course runs out in a thin 
ripple of musical verse which only makes 
the glitter of the bare sand beneath the 
more obtrusive. There is a sure refuge 
from all these faint and querulous voices 
which make the silence of the great woods, 
once overflowing with affluent melodies, 
the more apparent. These light-voiced 
singers sing their little songs, not for the 
1 08 



wide skies and the great stars and the silent 
day perfumed with hidden flowers, but for 
the ears of men. One has but to leave 
the outer edges of the woodland to forget 
these feeble cries ; one has but to seek the 
heart of the ancient forest to hear once 
more those magical notes which seem to 
rise out of the hidden world about him and 
to carry from its heart some secret to his 
own. The voices are still there ; and, 
better than all, the sublime ni\steries which 
charge those voices with thrilling ^,( 

music are there also. 

Nature is still what she has 
been to all the great poets 
from ^schylus to Emerson, 
although the critics announce the 
final disappearance of the " pa 
thctic fallacv " which underlies ^^ 
Wordsworth's verse. Poor critics! '| 
their oftence lies not in their 
failure to see, but in their denial ill 
that Wordsworth saw. Their I 
own defect of vision makes them // 

certain that there is no true 
sight among men. But those 
who see are not concerned 
109 



^1 



with such denials ; for them the sky is 
blue, though an army of blind men swear 
it black ; and to those who hear, life 
is still thrilled with mysterious voices 
though the deaf proclaim an eternal silence. 
Among so many doubters and sceptics it is 
pleasant to hear still the unbroken testi- 
mony of the older poets to the truths that 
were clear to them when life and youth 
were one. In his latest verse Browning 
strikes the old chords with a virile touch 
which evokes no uncertain sound. He 
pictures the Fates couched dragon-wise in 
the heart of night, casting over the upper 
world a darkness as impenetrable as that 
in which they measure and cut the threads 
of existence, and summing up life in words 
that seem, save for their vigour, borrowed 
from some of our minor singers : — 

" What 's infancy ? Ignorance, idleness, mis- 
chief: 
Youth ripens to arrogance, foolishness, 
greed : 
Age — impotence, churlishness, rancour." 

Into this chamber of blackness descends 
Apollo, and straightway a supernal light 



breaks on the three terrible sisters, which 
they cannot dim by a torrent of fateful 
words. The shining God thrusts heaven 
upon them : — 

" Regard how your cavern trom crag-tip to base 
Frowns sheer, height and depth adamantine, 
one death ! 
I rouse with a beam the whole rampart, dis- 
place 
No splinter — yet see how my flambeau, 
beneath 
And above, bids this gem wink, that crystal 
unsheathe." 

This is the divine office of that Imagina- 
tion of which Apollo will always remain 
the noblest symbol and the most significant 
creation. The fancy, delicate it may be 
as the flush on a rose or the sculptured 
line on a Grecian urn, can never take the 
place of that highest reason by which alone 
the ultimate truths are reached and the 
secrets of life revealed. The ''idle singer 
of an empty day," the doubting, hesitant 
singer, uncertain of his song, can never 
touch the heart of humanity, nor make it 
one with the world about it. The true 



poet is still the interpreter of the gods. 
" Thou true land-lord ! sea-lord ! air-lord ! 
Wherever snow falls or water flows or 
birds fly, wherever day and night meet in 
twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung 
by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are 
forms with transparent boundaries, wher- 
ever are outlets into celestial space, 
wherever is danger, and awe, and love — 
there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for 
thcc, and though thou shouldst walk the 
world over, thou shalt not be able to find 
a condition inopportune or ignoble." 



CHAPTER XII 




THE ARTIST TALKS 

** ^ AST night we sat late over the 

*/^''<n fire. It had been a blustering 

lLiv, but at sunset the wind 

ttll and the stars came out 

in splendid brilliancy. 

'/}-\\\ '(\m/-J Rosalind had taken up her 

^~ " 'c, r- 

ig a long, 
ing, when the door opened 
and our friend the artist walked abruptly 
in. Without ceremony, he dropped his 
hat and coat on a chair, and almost before 
we realised that he was in the house he 
was standing before the fire warming his 
hands and saying that it was an uncom- 
monly sharp night. No more welcome 
guest ever comes under our roof than the 
artist. Slender, alert, restless, speaking 
always the thought that is uppermost in 
his mind without reference to persons or 
8 113 




places, I do not know a more genuine, 
keen-sighted and aspiring human soul. I 
looked at him for a moment almost with 
curiosity; so rare is the sight of a man 
working out his life with eager joy and in 
entire unconsciousness of himself. His 
fellow-craftsmen are all talking about his 
extraordinary work, and the world is fast 
finding him out ; but he remains as simple- 
hearted as a child. It is this quality quite as 
much as the genius for expression which 
I find in him which assures me that he 
114 



nas the elements of greatness. When 
he begins to talk, we are always glad to 
remain silent ; such speech as his is rare. 
A fresher, clearer, more original talker 
never comes into the Study ; his thought 
flashes to the very heart of the theme, and 
we see it instantly in some fresh and 
striking aspect or relation. He is so far 
removed from the atmosphere of the 
materialistic spirit that he is as untouched 
and untainted by it as if it did not exist. 
Life grows rich under his speech ; be- 
comes splendid with interior truth and 
beauty ; becomes marvellously suggestive 
and inspiring. The commercial stand- 
point and standards do not enter into his 
conception of life and the world ; the con- 
ventional estimates and judgments do not 
lay a feather's weight on his alert, aspiring 
spirit. The other day I met him coming 
away from a rehearsal at which a famous 
pianist had so thrilled a great audience that 
the applause more than once broke in 
on the music. "That man is an artist," 
said my friend ; " did you notice how the 
crowd irritated him ? He hated us because 
we made him conscious of our presence." 
"5 



It happened that yesterday Rosalind and 
I had been looking at an etching of 
Meryon's, and we had naturally fallen to 
talking about the pathos of his life; a man 
of exquisite genius, every touch of whose 
hand is now precious, but who lived with- 
out recognition and died without hope. 
And as I had seen recently some account 
of the enormous aggregate value of Corot's 
works, I recalled also the long years of 
indift'erence and neglect through which the 
great artist waited and worked before fame 
entered his atelier. When we were com- 
fortably disposed before the fire, and the 
talk, breaking free from personal incident, 
began to flow in its accustomed channels, 
both Meryon and Corot were mentioned 
by Rosalind as illustrations of the struggle 
with the world to which some of the 
greatest souls are subjected ; and she 
added that it was hard to reconcile one's 
self to the swift success which often 
comes to lesser men while their superiors 
are fighting the battle with want and 
neglect. 

" Don't bother about that," said our 
friend, starting out of his chair and stand- 
1x6 



ing before the fire. "There is nothing 
that a real artist cares less for than what 
you call success. It Is generally a mis- 
fortune if he gets it early, and if it comes 
to him late he is indifferent to it. It is a 
misfortune when a man really wants bread 
and butter and can't get them ; when a 
man is so straitened that he cannot work 
in peace ; but that does not often happen. 
Most men earn enough to fill their mouths 
and cover their backs ; if they earn more, 
it generally means that they are throwing 
away their chances ; that the devil of 
popularity has got their ear and is burying 
them piecemeal. Neglect and indifference 
are things which a man ought to pray for, 
not things to be shunned while one lives 
and lamented after one is dead. Neglect 
and indifference mean freedom from temp- 
tation, long, quiet days in one's studio, 
hard work, sound sleep, and healthy 
growth. It was a great piece of luck for 
Corot that the world was so long in find- 
ing him ; that it left him so many years in 
peace to do his work and let his soul out. 
His contempt for popularity was well 
expressed in the phrase, ' Men are like 
117 



flies ; if one alights on a dish, others will 
follow.' No happier man ever lived than 
Corot during those years when there was 
nothing to do but sit in the fields, pipe in 
mouth, and watch the morning sky, and 
then go and paint it. As for Meryon, his 
case was a hard one ; but there was mad- 
ness in his blood, and, after all, he had the 
supreme satisfaction of saying his say. 
He put himself on his plates, and that was 
enough for any man. 

" People are so stupid about this matter 
of success," he continued, walking up and 
down the room. " They seem to think a 
man is miserable unless they crowd his 
studio. For my part, I don't want them 
there. Don't you understand that all an 
artist asks is a chance to work .? What 
we want is not success, but the chance to 
get ourselves on to canvas; I paint be- 
cause I can't help it ; I am tortured with 
thirst for expression. Give me expression, 
and I am happy ; deny it, and I am miser- 
able." Here a copy of Keats caught his 
eye. "It is the same with all of us; 
there was never a greater mistake than the 
idea that Keats was unhappy because 



critics fell ftnil of him and the people 
did n't read him. It is natural to wish 
that people would see things as we see 
them, but the chief thing is that we see 
them ourselves. Keats did n't write for 
the crowd; he wrote for himself. There 
was a pain in his soul that could only be 
eased by writing. When a man writes an 
'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' he doesn't 
need to be told that he is successful. 
Thev talk about Shakespeare's indifference 
to fame as if it were the sign of a small 
nature which could not recognise its own 
greatness. Can't thev see that Shakes- 
peare wrote to free his own mind and 
heart ? that before he wrote either play he 
had conquered in himself the weakness of 
Hamlet on the one hand, and the weakness 
of Romeo on the other ? Never was a 
man more fortunate than Shakespeare, for 
he wrote himself entirely out; he com- 
pletely expressed himself. I can imagine 
him turning his back on London and 
settling down to his small concerns at 
Stratford with supreme content. What 
can the world gi\e to or take from the 
man who has lived his life and put the 
119 



whole of it into art ? I understand that 
everybody is reading lirowning nowadays; 
I am surprised they waited so long. I 
discovered him long ago, and have fed on 
him ever since, because I felt the eager 
longing for life and the quenchless thirst 
for expression in him. No English poet 
has said such true things about art, because 
no one else has understood so thoroughly 
an artist's hunger and thirst, and the things 
th:it give him peace." Just at this point, 
when I was getting into a talking mood 
myself, our friend stopped suddenly, 
declared that he had forgotten an engage- 
ment, seized his hat and coat, and made 
off after his customary abrupt fashion. 




CHAPTER XIII 

ESCAPING FROM BONDAGE 

(5^ /fJlAVE often pictured to myself the 
scene in the old Tower when 
Raleigh broke the spell of 
prison life by writing the his- 
tory of the world. The rest- 
less prisoner, a born leader and 
man of affairs, whose ambitious 
projects were spread over two 
continents, was suddenly secluded from 
the life of his time at the hour when 
that life had for every daring spirit an 
irresistible attraction. On the instant this 
audacious courtier of fortune, ready to take 
advantage of any wind and strike for any 
prize, was locked and bolted in the solitude 
of a cell ! Such a man must find vent for 
his arrested energies, or prey upon himself. 
If Raleigh could not go to the world, the 
world must come to him ! And it came, 
not to scorn and triumph over him, but to 



submit to the calm scrutiny of his active 
mind. There have been more striking 
examples of the victory of a soul over its 
surroundings ; Epictetus made himself free 
though a slave, and Marcus Aurelius 
learned how to serve though an emperor ; 
but there has been no more dramatic illus- 
tration of the victorious assertion of 
personality. 

The limitations of most li\es are by no 
means so tangible as the walls within which 
Raleigh was confined, but there is a cer- 
tain amount of restriction laid on us all. 
We are all prisoners in some sense ; the 
great man who, of all others, demonstrated 
most sublimely the superiority of the soul 
over all external conditions, described him- 
self as " a prisoner of hope." lliere are 
fixed limits to the activity of even the 
freest life ; and for many, a narrow field is 
set both for happiness and for work. 
There is one place, however, where no 
boundaries are fixed, no doors closed, no 
bolts shot : among his books a man laughs 
at his bonds and finds an open road out 
of every form of imprisonment. Last 
nitrht Rosalind read to me, from Silvio 



Pellico's Memoirs, pictures of his prison 
life. His very bondage had furnished 
material for his pen ; out of the barrenness 
of his prisons he had gathered a harvest 
of experience and thought. There is no 
kind of bondage which life lays upon us 
that may not yield both sweetness and 
strength, and nothing reveals a man's 
character more fully than the spirit in 
which he bears his limitations. 

It is an easy matter for the man of 
many burdens and of sharp restrictions of 
duty and opportunity to become envious, 
to rail at fate, and to decry the fortune and 
work of those who are better circum- 
stanced. It is verv easy for such a man 
to shut his mind and heart within the 
same walls which confine his body, and to 
become narrow, hard, and unsympathetic. 
There are hosts of men who impose their 
own limitations on the world and set up 
their own narrowness as the standard of 
virtue ; who identify their own small con- 
ceptions of time and eternity with a divine 
revelation of truth and pronounce all who 
differ from them anathema. There are 
few spectacles more common or more 
123 



pitiful than these strange illusions by 
which men mistake their littleness for 
greatness and the narrow boundaries of 
their own thoughts and feelings for the 
outermost bounds and sheer edge of the 
universe. To be in prison and not be 
conscious of the bondage is surely a tragic 
comment on one's ideal of freedom. 

We are all shut up within intangible 
walls of ignorance, prejudice, half-knowl- 
edge ; and the difference between men is 
not the difference between those who are 
in bonds and those who are free, but 
between those who feel their bondage and 
are striving for freedom, and those who, 
being bound, think themselves loose. The 
long story of the struggles and agonies and 
achievements of men is the story of the 
unbroken effort for freedom ; it is the 
record of countless attempts to break jail 
and live under God's clear heavens. 
Hegel declared that the great fact of 
history is the struggle for freedom, and 
Matthew Arnold reaffirmed the same thing 
when he said again and again that the 
instinct for expansion is at the bottom of 
the movement of civilisation. It is this 

144 



heroic endeavour, often futile, often de- 
feated, but never abandoned, which gives 
history its dignity and its thrilling interest. 
Of the spiritual and intellectual struggles 
toward light and freedom literature gives 
the fullest and most authentic account. 
Great writers have always been in advance 
of their time, and the impulse toward 
expression has come largely from the 
inspiration of escape from some bondage 
in which other men are held. From 
Socrates to Browning, the thinkers and 
poets have all been emancipators. In the 
end this bringing of new light into the 
mind of the world will be counted their 
chief service. "When I am dead," said 
one of the keenest of modern minds, one 
of the greatest of modern poets, " lay a 
sword on my coffin, for I was a soldier in 
the war for the liberation of humanity." 
Like service has been rendered bv almost 
all the great writers. They have seen 
beyond their time ; they have parted com- 
pany with some usage, some tradition out 
of which the life had ebbed ; they have 
broken away from some decaying creed ; 
they have put some new knowledge in the 
125 



place of some old ignorance. The steady 
movement of great literature is toward the 
light ; and there are few instrumentalities 
so potent to destroy provincialism, to dis- 
sipate popular misconceptions, and to sub- 
stitute for parochial standards and ideas the 
larger thought of the larger world of open- 
minded men. Literature is the hereditary 
enemy of half-truths, of false perspectives 
in looking at life, of partial estimates in 
dealing with men. No man can open his 
mind to the spirit and teaching of the 
greatest minds without suffering an enlarge- 
ment of vision. A man can remain small 
in a library only by refusing the noble 
fellowship which lies within his reach; he 
cannot have companionship with inspiring 
persons and escape some share in their 
nobler vision of life. 



CHAPTER XIV 




/c-S5^^3c>^ 



SOME OLD SCHOLARS 

HE Study door is rarely 
closed. For the most part, 
flM Wifi '^^ stands open to those 
'' ' ^^™ vague and wandering 
sounds which rather serve 
to convey a sense of com- 
panionship than to inter- 
rupt thought and dissipate interest. The 
deepest studies sometimes miss their best 
results because they are too solitary. The 
scholar must !:eep out of the bustle of 
active j'lfc-, but if he cross the line of 
sympathy, if he lose touch with his day 
and his fellows, there is an end of his 
usefulness. Nothing interprets a great 
book or a great picture like human life ; it 
is the only commentary on the growth of 
art which is worth studying, for in it alone 
are to be found the secrets and the mean- 
ing of art. The scholar must always be 

127 



In the best sense a man of the world : one 
by whom the faces and souls of men are 
daily read with the insight of sympathy ; 
one to whom the great movement of 
humanity is the supreme fact to be felt, to 
be studied, to be interpreted. It is this 
vital relation to his own age which dis- 
tinguishes the scholar from the pedant — 
the man to whom the heart of knowledge 
rcveala it --^If from the man whose fellow- 
ship with the past is always only " dust to 
dust, ashcj to ashes." 

It was just this vitality, this living rela- 
tion to living things, which separated the 
first great modern scholar from the genera- 
tions of forgotten Dry-as-Dusts who pre- 
ceded him. Petrarch really escaped from 
a sepulchre when he stepped out of the 
cloister of mediievalism, with its crucifix, 
its pictures of unhealthy saints, its cords 
of self-flagellation, and found the heavens 
clear, beautiful, and well worth living 
under, and the world full of good things 
which one might desire and yet not be 
given over to evil. He ventured to look 
at life for himself, and he found it full of 
wonderful power and dignity. He opened 



his Virgil, brushed aside the cobwebs 
which monkish brains had spun over the 
beautiful lines, and met the old poet as 
one man meets another ; and, lo ! there 
rose before him a new, untrodden, and 
wholly human world, free from priestcraft 
and pedantry, near to nature, and unspeak- 
ably alluring and satisfying. Digging down 
through a vast overgrowth of superstition 
and pedantry, Petrarch found the real soil 
of life once more, and found that antiquity 
had its roots there quite as much as medi- 
aevalism ; that the Greeks and Romans 
were flesh and blood quite as truly as the 
image-worshipping Italians. Then came 
the inevitable thought that these men were 
not outcasts from the grace and care of 
heaven, " dead and damned heathen," 
whose civilisation had been a mere worth- 
less husk to protect the later Christian 
society, but that they belonged in the 
divinely appointed order of history, had 
lived their lives and done their work and 
gone to their rest as the later generations 
were doing. The moment Petrarch under- 
stood these very simple but then very 
radical truths his whole attitude toward the 
9 1*9 



past was changed ; it was no longer a for- 
bidden country, but a fresh, untrodden 
world, rich in all manner of noble activities 
and experiences, full of character, signifi- 
cance, divinity. There is no need to recall 
the mighty stirrings of soul that followed; 
in Humanism the mind had come into 
fresh contact with life and received a new 
and overmastering impulse. The new 
learning ran like fire over Italy ; old men 
forsook their vices for the charms of 
scholarship, young men exchanged their 
pleasures for the garb and habits of the 
student ; the air was charged with the 
electricity of new thought, and all minds 
turned to the future with a prophetic sense 
of the great new age on whose threshold 
they stood. 

It was inevitable that in the course of 
time Humanism itself should become 
pedantic and formal, should lose its hold 
upon the turbulent and restless life about 
\t, and should finally give place to a later 
and still more vital scholarship. Nothing 
pauses in the sublime evolution of history ; 
there is no place of rest in that pilgrimage 
which is an eternal truth seeking. It 
130 



would be interesting to trace the inner 
history of the learning which Petrarch and 
Boccaccio and the men of the great Italian 
Revival carried through Europe, and to 
meet here and there some large-minded, 
noble-hearted scholar, standing book in 
hand, but always with the windows of his 
chamber open to the fields and woods, 
always with the doors of his life open to 
human need and fellowship. For true 
scholarship never dies; the fire sometimes 
passes from one to another in the hollow 
of a reed, as in the earliest time, but it 
never goes out. I confess that I can 
never read quite unmoved the story of the 
Brethren of the Common Life, those 
humble-minded, patient teachers and 
thinkers whose devotion and fire of soul 
for a century and a half made the choice 
treasures of Italian palaces and convents 
and universities a common possession along 
the low-lying shores of the Netherlands. 
The asceticism of this noble brotherhood 
was no morbid and divisive fanaticism ; it 
was a denial of themselves that they might 
have the more to give. The visions 
which touched at times the bare walls of 
131 



their cells with supernal beauty only made 
them the more eager to share their heaven 
of privilege with the sorely burdened world 
without. Surely Virgil and Horace and 
the other masters of classic form were 
never more honoured than when these 
noble-minded lovers of learning and of 
their kind made their sounding lines 
familiar in peasant homes. Among the 
great folios of the fifteenth century, the 
very titles of which the modern scholar no 
longer burdens his memory with, there is 
one little volume which the world has 
known by heart these four hundred years 
and more. Its bulk is so small that one 
may carry it in his pocket, but its depth 
of feeling is so great that one never gets 
quite to the bottom of it, and its outlook 
is so sublime that one never sees quite to 
the end of it. The great folios are monu- 
ments of patience and imperfect informa- 
tion ; this little volume is instinct with 
human life; a soul speaks to souls in it. 
It was by no caprice of nature that the 
" De Imitatione Christi " was written by a 
member of the Brotherhood of the Com- 
mon Life. And when the great hour of 
13* 



deliverance from priestcraft for Germany 
and Northern Europe came, it was no 
accident that made another member of the 
same order the fellow-worker with Luther 
for liberty of thought. Erasmus was no 
reformer, but he was a true scholar, and 
in the splendour of his great attainments 
and the importance of his great service the 
obscure virtues of the Brotherhood of the 
Common Life receive a final and perpetual 
illumination. 

In Kaulbach's striking cartoon of the 
Reformation there is one figure which no 
one overlooks, although Shakespeare and 
Michael Angelo stand in full view. 
Among the masters of art and literature 
the cobbler, with his leather apron, finds a 
place by right of possession which no one 
of his compeers would dispute. The six 
thousand compositions of Hans Sachs are 
for the most part forgotten, with the in- 
numerable poems of the Minnesingers and 
Meistersingers, but there remain a few 
verses which the world will not care to 
forget. In spite of the roughness of his 
verse, its unmelodious movement, its lack 
of musical cadence and accent, the cobbler 
133 



Df Niirnberg lived in the life of his time-, 
he had eyes that looked upoji the skies and 
fields, and a heart that was one with the 
hearts of his people. It was this vital per- 
ception that saved him from slavery to the 
mechanism of verse and made him a poet 
in spite of his time ajid himself, A genu- 
ii^e scholar, and yet a man of the people, 
Hans Sachs lifts himself out of the mechan- 
ical pedantry of his age by the freshness of 
his contact with life. He might truly 
have said of himself, as he has said of 
another : 

" But he — I say with sorrow — 
Is a wretched singer thorough. 
Who all his songs must borrow 
From what was sung before." 

No man can live in a " Palace of Art " 
without danger of missing, not only his 
own highest development, but that heritage 
of truth which is always a common and 
never a personal possession. The poet 
who separates himself from his fellows 
reproduces himself by a law which holds 
him powerless in its grasp ; the poet 
who lives richly and deeply with his kind 
134 



learns the secrets of all hearts, and, like 
Shakespeare, sees the endless procession 
of humanity passing as he looks into his 
own soul. The scholar masters the letter 
and misses the spirit as he sits in unbroken 
seclusion among his books ; the light of 
common love and joy and sorrow which 
alone penetrates knowledge to its heart and 
suffuses bare statement with the soul of 
truth fades from the page utterly. And 
so the study door stands open, and inter- 
mingling with the great thoughts of the 
past there comes the sound of voices that 
break the solitude of life with hope and 
faith and love, and the rush of little feet 
that transform it with that thought of 
eternal youth which is only another word 
for immortality. 



135 



CHAPTER XV 




^ DULL DAYS 

i7^ /f//k^ T is a day of mist and rain \ 
day without light or colour. 
The leaden sky rests heavily, 
almost oppressively, on the 
earth, the monotonous drop- 
2) ping of the rain sets the 
gray dreariness of the day to a slow, 
unvarying rhythm. On such 2 day nature 
seems wrapped in an inaccessible mood, 
and one gets no help from her. On such 
a day it not unfrequently happens that 
one's spirits take on the colour of the 
world, and not a flower blooms, not a bird 
sings, in the garden of the imagination. 
If one yields to the mood, he puts on the 
hair shirt of the penitent, a!id spends the 
long hours in recalling his sins and calcu- 
lating the sum total of his mistakes. If 
one is candid and sensitive, the hours as 
they pass steadily add to the balance on the 
136 



debit side of the account, and long ~' 

ere the night comes bankruptcy has been 
reached and accepted as a just award of' 
an ill-spent life. Evervbodv who has any 
imagination, and suffers lapses from a 
good physical condition, knows these gray 
days and dreads them as visitors who 
enter without the formality of knocking, 
and who linger long after the slender 
welcome which gave them unwilling rec- 
ognition has been worn threadbare. One 
cannot wholly get away from the weather 
even if his mind be of the sanest and his 
body of the soundest; we are too much 
involved in the general order of things not 
to be more or less sympathetic with the 
atmosphere and sky. There are days 
when one must make a strenuous effort 
to be less than gay ; there are days when 
137 



one must make an equally strenuous 
effort to preserve the bare appearance of 
cheerfulness. 

And yet no man need be the slave of 
the day ; he may escape out of it into the 
broad spaces of the years, into the vastness 
of the centuries. There is every kind of 
weather in books, and on such a day as 
this one has but to make his choice of 
climate, season, and sky. Stirring the fire 
until it throws a ruddy glow on the 
windows where the melancholy day weeps 
in monotonous despair, I may open The- 
ocritus, and what to me are the fogs and 
mists of March on the Atlantic coast ? I 
am in Sicily, and the olive and pine are 
green, sky and sea meet in a line so blue 
that I know not whether it be water or 
atmosphere ; the cicada whirs ; the birds 
stir in the little wood ; and from the dis- 
tance come the notes of the shepherd's 
pipe. All this is mine if I choose to 
stretch out my hand and open a little book 
— all this and a hundred other shining 
skies north and south, east and west. I 
need not spend a minute with this March 
day if I choose to open any one of these 
138 



countless doors of escape. I know the 
roads well, for I ha\e often taken them 
when such mists as these that lie upon the 
woods and meadows have pressed too 
closely on my spirits. 

But there is something to be learned 
from a dull day, and the wiser part is to 
stay and con the lesson. He who knows 
only brilliant skies has still to know some 
of the profoundest aspects behind which 
nature conceals herself. Corot's morning 
skies stir the imagination to its very 
depths ; but so also do those noble etch- 
ings of Van Gravesande which report the 
blackness of night and storm about the 
lighthouse and the sombre mystery of 
the deep woods. 

A dull day need not be a depressing 
day ; depression always implies physical 
or moral weakness, and is, therefore, never 
to be tolerated so long as one can struggle 
against it. But a dull day — a day with- 
out deep emotions, inspiring thought, 
marked events ; a day monotonous and 
colourless; a day which proclaims itself 
neutral among all the conflicting interests 
of life, is a day to be valued. Such a day 
139 




is recuperative, sedative, repose- 
ful. It gives emotion opportunity 
to accumulate volume and force, 
thought time to clarify and review 
its conclusions, the senses that 
inaction which freshens them for 
clearer perceptions and keener 
enjoyments. A dull day is 
often the mother of many 
■ • \ bright days. It is easy to 

surrender one's 
self to the better 
mood of 
such a day; 
lo accept 
Its repose 
and reject 
its gloom. As the hours pass one finds 
himself gently released from the tension of 
the work which had begun to haunt his 
dreams, quietly detached from places and 
persons associated with the discipline and 
responsibility of daily occupation. The 
steady dropping of the rain soothes and 
calms the restlessness of a mind grown too 
fixed upon its daily task; the low-h'ing 
mists aid the illusion that the world beyond 
140 



is a dream, and that the only reality is here 
within these cheerful walls. After a time 
this passive enjoyment becomes active, this 
negative pleasure takes on a positive form. 
There is something pleasant in the beat 
of the storm, something agreeable in the 
colorless landscape. One has gotten rid 
of his every-day self, and gotten into the 
mood of a day which discountenances great 
enterprises and sustained endeavours of 
every kind. One stirs the fire with 
infinite satisfaction, and coddles himself 
in the cosy contrast between the cheerful- 
ness within and the gloom without. One 
wanders from window to window, lounges 
in every easy chair, gives himself up to 
dreams which come and go without order 
or coherence, as if the mind had given 
itself up to play. Pleasant places and 
faces reappear from a past into which they 
had been somewhat rudely pressed by a 
present too busy to concern itself with 
memories ; old plans reform themselves, 
old purposes and hopes are revived ; the 
works one meant to accomplish and 
abandoned by the way disclose new pos- 
sibilities of realisation. When the after- 
141 



noon begins to darken, one finds that he 
has gathered from the past many fragments 
that promise to find completion in some 
new and sounder form. It has been a day 
of gleaning, if not of harvesting. As the 
night descends, fresh fuel renews the 
smouldering flame, and the past, so quietly, 
almost unconsciously, recalled, projects 
itself into the future, and stirs the imagina- 
tion with a hope that to-morrow may be- 
come a purpose, and the day after an 
achievement. 



141 




CHAPTER XVI 

THE UNIVERSAL 
BIOGRAPHY 

LL day long the snow has 
been whirling over the 
fields in shapes so varied 
and so elusive that I have 
fancied myself present at a dance of phan- 
toms — wandering ghosts of dead seasons 
haunting the fields which once spread out 
sunlighted and fragrant before them. At 
intervals the sun has pierced the clouds 
and touched the earth with a dazzling 
brilliancy, but for the most part the winds 
have driven the storm before them, and 
at times wrapped all visible things in a 
white mist of obscurity. On such a day 
the open fire lights the open book with 
a glow of peculiar cheer and friendliness ; 
it seems to search out whatever of human 
warmth lies at the root of a man's thought, 
and to kindle it with a kindred heat. On 
such a day the companionable quality of a 




book discovers itself as at no other time; 
it seems to take advantage of the absence of 
nature to exert its own peculiar charm. In 
summer the vast and inexhaustible life of 
nature, audible at every hour and present at 
every turn of thought, makes most books 
pallid and meagre. In the universal light 
which streams over the earth all lights of 
man's making seem artificial, unreal, and 



out of place. There are days in summer 
when the best book affects one as a stage 
set for the play in broad daylight. But 
when the days are shortened, and darkness 
lies on half the dial-plate, the life that is 
in books takes heart again and boldly 
claims companionship with the noblest 
minds. 

As I look out of my window I recognise 
scarcely a feature of last summer's land- 
scape, so universal and so illusive is the 
transformation which the snow has wrought. 
It is a veritable new world which stretches 
away, white and silent, toward the horizon. 
But this change is not greater than that of 
which I am conscious as I look within and 
follow the lines of my books around the 
walls. These wear a new aspect, and one 
that appeals to me with a subtle sense of 
fellowship. Last summer we were casual 
acquaintances; to-day we are intimate and 
inseparable friends. It is not only true 
that there is always a man back of a book, 
but in every book there is always a part 
of one's self. The greater a book is, the 
more familiar it is ; we do not stop to 
weigh its affirmations and conclusions; 
lo 145 



we have always known them to be true. 
A chapter of scientific investigation, a page 
in a book of mere information, will chal- 
lenge our criticism and arouse our antag- 
onism ; but a book of power, a book which 
records the dropping of the lead into some 
fathomless pool of consciousness, com- 
mands our assent at once ; it simply ex- 
presses what we have always known. In 
summer, nature spreads all manner of 
nets to beguile us out of ourselves ; but 
when the fires sing to us, their cheerful 
monotone becomes a softly touched accom- 
paniment to our introspection. The golden 
milestone in the Roman Forum, from 
which one could begin his journey to the 
four quarters of the globe, has its analogue 
in every man's soul -, into whatever part 
of the universe he would travel, he must 
start from his own personal consciousness. 
Our thoughts make highways of the 
courses which they habitually take when 
we leave them to themselves, and footpaths 
along which they loiter when fancy be- 
guiles them unawares into her companion- 
ship. But, however the journey be 
undertaken, or to whatever quarter it 
146 



tend, thought always starts from and 
returns to one's self. It is through our 
own consciousness that we penetrate the 
secrets of other experiences and interpret 
the mystery of the universe. 

There is a sense, therefore, in which all 
the great books are chapters out of our 
personal history. We read them with a 
certain sense of ownership; the feeling of 
a man who comes upon a mechanical 
device which he long ago hit upon, but 
never took the trouble to protect by patent. 
We can never be surprised bv any revela- 
tion of life or character, because we carry 
every possible development of these within 
the invisible realm of our own conscious- 
ness. Marlowe's " Tamburlaine " fills us 
with no astonishment, and the story of the 
latest hero who died for imperilled humanity 
stirs our pulses mainly because the swift 
crisis appeals to our nobility as it appealed 
to his. How often we chance upon books 
that seem to be literal transcriptions of 
our own experiences ! It fills us with a 
sense of discomfort that we should be so 
well known, that the curtain should have 
been lifted so ruthlessly upon a past which 
H7 



wc were striving to forget. It is this com- 
mon consciousness, this participation in a 
common memory, which keeps us within 
call of each other in all the great crises of 
life, and makes our libraries places of con- 
fession and penitence. In the world's 
cathedral at Rome there are confessionals 
to whose impersonal sympathy appeals 
may be made in every language spoken by 
civilized men ; but every library is a truer 
confessional, and a more universal, than 
St. Peter's. The dome which overarches 
every collection of great books is nothing 
less than the infinite sky which stretches 
over the life of man, and no human soul 
evC'r failed to find under it the rhrine of its 
own tutelary saint. Literature keeps the 
whole race under constant conviction of 
sin, and there are hours when every man 
feels like locking his study door, so abso- 
lutely uncovered and revealed does his life 
lie in the speech of some great book. 

Shakespeare knew us all so well that 
one feels the uselessness of any attempt at 
concealment in his presence ; those pene- 
trating eyes make all disguise impossible. 
He takes little account of our masquerade, 
148 



except to sharpen the edge of his irony by 
a contrast between our pretension and the 
bare facts of our lives. And this revela- 
tion of our inner selves is the core of every 
book that endures. It is already clear that 
all the systems of philosophy have had 
their day, and are fast ceasing to be ; and 
there is every prospect that the scholastic 
systems of theology are going the same 
road. The facts of life — divine and 
human — transcend them all, and their 
poverty and inadequacy are more and more 
apparent. The universe is too vast for 
the girdle of thought ; it sweeps away 
immeasurably, and fades out of imagination 
in the splendour of uncounted suns. There 
will be safe paths of knowledge through 
it for men of reverence and humility, but 
the old highway of human omniscience is 
falling into decay. The utmost service of 
the greatest man is to bring us one step 
nearer to the truth, not as it lies clear and 
absolute in the mind of the Infinite, but as 
it touches, reveals, and sustains this brief 
and troubled life of ours. Therefore it 
has been that the poets have dorie more for 
the highest truth than the philosophers, 
149 



unless the philosophers have also been 
poets, as has happened now and then since 
the days of Plato. One turns often er for 
inspiration to Wordsworth's ode on "Im- 
mortality," or to Browning's " Death in 
the Desert " or " Saul," than to Kant's 
"Critique of Pure Reason" or Spencer's 
" First Principles." 

When 1 go into the great libraries I am 
oppressed, not by the mass of volumes 
packed together under a single roof, but 
by the complexity and vastness of the life 
that lies behind them. Books by the 
hundred thousand have been written to 
give that life expression, and yet how little 
has been said that goes to the very heart 
of existence ! When one has read the 
great books in all literatures, how much 
still remains unuttered within him ! 



IS© 




CHAPTER XVII 

A SECRET OF GENIUS 

NE of the tests of great- 
ness is bulk. Mere mass 
never demonstrated the 
possession of genius, but 
men who have borne 
the stamp of this rare 
and incommunicable 
quality have generally 
been creators on a great scale. One may 
write a single poem and give it the touch 
of immortality ; a line may linger as long 
in the ear of the world as an epic or a 
lyric. But, as a rule, the man who writes 
one perfect verse adds to it many of a 
kindred beauty, and he who paints one 
great picture covers the walls of the 
gallery. Genius is energy quite as much 
as insight, and whether it dwell in Shake- 
speare or in Napoleon, in Michael Angelo 
or in Gladstone, it is always the mother 



of mighty works as well as of great 
thoughts. Shakespeare, Goethe, Lope de 
Vega, Moliere, Tennyson, Browning, 
Hugo, Balzac, Scott, Thackeray, fill great 
space on the shelves of our libraries 
as well as in our histories of literature. 
In " Louis Lambert " Balzac describes 
certain forces, when they take possession 
of strong personalities, as " rivers of will ; " 
there is an impetus in these potential men 
which sweeps away all obstacles and rolls 
on with the momentum of a great stream. 
Li men of genius the same tireless activity, 
the same forceful habit, are often found ; 
nothing daunts them ; nothing subdues 
them ; they make all things tributary to 
self-expression. 

The story of the achievements of Lope 
de Vega, of Scott, of Balzac, has at times 
a hint of commerce with magical powers ; 
so difficult is it to reconcile such marvel- 
lous fecundity, such extraordinary creative 
force, with the usual processes of produc- 
tion. Nature has fixed definite boundaries 
to the activity of most men ; there is an 
invisible line beyond which they seem 
powerless to go. Upon the man of genius 
15a 



no such limitations are imposed ; if he 
drains his soul, it is instantly refilled from 
some invisible fountain. There is some- 
thing magical about such an achievement 
as the writing of the " Comedie Humaine," 
with its eighty and more volumes and its 
vast community of characters. The phys- 
ical feat of covering so much paper is no 
small matter ; one does not wonder that 
Balzac retired to his work-shop with an 
unwritten romance in his mind and re- 
turned with the completed work, worn, 
exhausted, almost emaciated. Such labors 
cannot be accomplished save by fasting 
and self-denial. More than two thousand 
personalities live and move and have their 
being in the " Comedie Humaine," and 
each is carefully studied, vividly realized, 
firmly drawn. In no actual community 
of the same number of souls is there any- 
thing approaching the distinctness of indi- 
viduality, the variety and force of character, 
to be found in these volumes. Pioneers 
build houses, subdue forests, develop wastes. 
Balzac did more ; he fashioned a world 
and peopled it. All passions^ appetites, 
aspirations, despairs, hopes, losses, labors, 
»53 



sufferings, achievements, were known to 
him ; he had mastered them, and he used 
them as if they were to serve no other- 
purpose than that of furnishing material 
for his hand. To have looked into the 
depths of human life with so wide and 
penetrating a gaze ; to have breathed a 
soul into these abstract qualities ; to have 
clothed them with the habits, manners, 
characteristics, dress, social surroundings, 
of actual beings ; to have lodged them in 
country and city — is there any fairy tale 
so wonderful, any miracle wrought by 
genie or magician so bewildering ? Here, 
surelv, are the evidences of the flow of 
one of those rivers of will which have 
more than once transformed society. 

One of the secrets of this marvellous 
fecundity is to keep one's self in the mood 
and atmosphere in which imagination and 
heart work as one harmonious and con- 
tinuous energy. There is an element of 
inspiration in all great work which is never 
wholly at command ; with the greatest as 
with humbler men, it ebbs and flows. 
There are times when it comes in with 
the rush of the flood ; when the mind is 
'54 



suddenly fertilized with ideas, when the 
heart is " a nest of singing birds," when 
the whole visible world shines and glows. 
There are times, also, when its ebb leaves 
mind and heart as bare and vacant as the 
beach from which the tide has receded. 
These alternations of ebb and flow, of 
darkness and light, are not unknown to the 
greatest souls ; they are the invariable 
accompaniments of that quality of soul 
which makes a man the interpreter of his 
fellow and of the world which is common 
ground between them. There is some- 
thing above us whose instruments we are; 
there are currents of inspiration which 
touch us and our strength is " as the 
strength of ten ; " which pass from us and, 
like Samson shorn, we are as pvgmies with 
other pygmies. No man wholly com- 
mands these affluent moods, these creative 
impulses; but some men learn the secret 
of appropriating them, of keeping within 
their range. These are the men who hold 
themselves with immovable purpose to the 
conditions of their work ; who refuse all 
solicitations, resist all temptations, to com- 
promise with customary habits and pleas- 



ures ; who keep themselves in their own 
world, and, working or waiting, achieve 
complete self-expression. " I am always 
at work," said a great artist, " and when 
an inspiration comes I am ready to make 
the most of it." Inspiration rarely leaves 
such a man long un visited. One looks at 
Turner's pictures with wonder in liis 
heart. In this rushing, roaring, sooty 
London, with its leaden skies, its return- 
ing clouds and obscuring fogs, how were 
such dreams wooed and won ? The 
painter's life answers the (lucstion. Lon- 
don had small share of Turner; he lived 
in a world of his own making, and the 
flush of its sky, the glory of its golden 
atmosphere, never wholly faded from his 
vision. 



156 



CHAPTER XVIII 



OOKS AND THINGS 




NE of the pleasantest feat- 
ures of life is the uncon- 
scious faculty which most 
things possess of forming 
themselves into groups, 
or allying themselves 
with each other in the 
most delightful associa- 
tions. How easy and how agreeable it is 
to surround one's self with an atmosphere 
of congenial habits and customs ! One 
awakes in the morning to a day that is 
no empty house to be explored and warmed 
and made habitable, but which stretches 
pleasantly on like a familiar bit of road, 
with its well-remembered turns and resting- 
places. It is a delightful prelude to the 
new dav to recall, in a brief review just 
before rising, the dear faces of the house- 
hold one is to see again, the sunny rooms 
157 



to which one will shortly descend, the 
open fire before which one will stand 
while breakfast is being laid, the books 
still open from last night's reading, the 
friendly voices soon to be heard on the 
street, and the accustomed work waiting 
for one's hand. With such pictures in 
his mind one rises cheerfully to meet 
the toils and demands of another working 
day. The law of association weaves a 
man's life after a time into a rich and 
varied texture, in which the sober threads 
of care and work are interwoven with 
the soft hues of love and the splendid 
dyes of imagination ; feelings, thoughts, 
actions, are no longer detached and isolated ; 
they are blended together into the fulness 
and symmetry of a rich life. One's toil 
from the thought of 
those to whose 



comfort it ministers; 
one's books are en- 
riched by the con- 
sciousness of the 
immeasurable life 
from which they flow 
as tiny rivulets; 



sweetness 




[58 






^. 



one's friends stand for genius and art and 
noble achievement ; and one's life ceases 
to be a single strain, and becomes a har- 
mony of many chords, each suggesting and 
deepening the melody of every other. 

Last evening, after dinner, Rosalind, 
after her usual custom, began plaving some 
simple, beautiful German compositions, to 
which the children never fail to respond 
with a merry frolic. When she came to 
the end of the daily programme, one of the 
dancers, golden hair all in disorder, pointed 
159 



to a page in the open music book, and 
said : " Mamma, please play that ; it always 
makes me think of ' Baby Bell.' " Happy 
Mr. Aldrich ! Could anything be more 
delightful than to know that one's verse is 
associated with music in the mind of a 
child ! The simple request, with its rea- 
son, made a deep impression on me ; I saw 
for the first time how early the sense of 
universal beauty is awake in childhood, and 
how instinctively it sees that all beautiful 
things are akin to each other. It was the 
first page in that sublime revelation of the 
soul of things through which a man comes 
at last to see in one vision the flower at 
his feet and the evening star silvery and 
solitary on the girdle of the early night, the 
radiant smile on the face that he loves and 
the great measureless wealth of sunshine 
across the summer fields. It is this clear 
perception of the universal relationship of 
things which makes a man a scholar 
instead of a pedant, and turns a library 
into a place of inspiration and impulse 
instead of a place of memory and repose. 

In my experience the association between 
books and music is intimate and ever re- 
i6o 



■^ . ■ 






during. I never hear a ceriaui piece of 
Haydn's without seeing, on the instant, 
the massive ranges of the Scottish High- 
lands as they rise into the still heavens in 
the pages of Walter Scott's " Waverley ; " 
and there is another simple melody which 
carries me back to the shipwreck in the 
"/Eneid." Some books seem to have 
found a more subtle rendering at the hands 



of Chopin ; and there are others which 
recall movements in Beethoven's sym- 
phonies. For this reason it is a great 
delight to read with a soft accompaniment 
of music in another room ; there always 
remains an echo of melody hidden in the 
heart of thoughts that have come to one 
under such circumstances, and which gives 
back its unheard note when they are read 
again elsewhere. In reading Milton one 
rarely forgets that the hand which wrote 
" Paradise Lost " knew the secrets of the 
organ and could turn them into sound at 
will. 

How many and how rich are the per- 
sonal associations of books that have grad- 
ually been brought together as one needed 
them for his work, and was drawn there 
by some personal longing ! This book has 
the author's name written in a character- 
istic hand on the fly-leaf; between the 
leaves of its neighbour is hidden a friendly 
note from the writer, recalling the peculiar 
circumstances under which it was written ; 
and in this famous novel which lies open 
before me there is a rose which bloomed 
last summer across the sea in the novelist's 
i6z 



garden in Surrey. In a place by them- 
selves are six little volumes worn with 
much reading and with many journeyings. 
For many years they were the constant 
companions of one whose hand touched 
some of the deepest chords of life, and 
made a music of her own which the world 
will not soon forget. They speak to me 
sometimes with the clearness and authority 
of her own words, so many are the traces 
which she has left upon them of intimate 
fellowship. They have been read by the 
fjords of Norway and the lakes of Italy, 
and I never open them without feeling the 
presence of that eager and aspiring spirit 
to whom every day was an open door to a 
new truth and a fresh life. Indeed, I am 
never so near the world as in my study, 
nor do I ever feel elsewhere the burden 
and mystery of life coming in upon me 
with such awful and subduing power. 
There are hours when these laden shelves 
seem to me like some vast organ upon 
whose keys an unseen hand evokes the 
full harmony of life. 

What a magical power of recalling past 
intellectual experiences familiar books pos- 
163 



sess! — experiences that were the beginnings 
of new epochs in our personal history. 
One mav ahnost recount the growth of 
his mind by the titles of great books; the 
first reading of Carlyle's essay on " Char- 
acteristics," of Emerson's " Nature," of 
(joethe's " Faust," of Coleridge's " Liter- 
aria Biographica" — how the freshness and 
inspiration of those hours of dawning 
insight come back to one as he turns the 
well-worn leaves ! It used to be regarded 
as a rare piece of good fortune to have the 
opportunity of loaning books to Coleridge ; 
the great thinker always returned them 
with margins enriched with criticisms and 
comments and references often of far 
greater value than the text itself. A book 
so annotated, with the initials S. T. C. on 
every other page, became thereafter too 
precious ever to be loaned again. In like 
manner there are written on the margins 
of the books we have about us all manner 
of personal incident and history ; no one 
reads these invisible records but ourselves, 
but to us they sometimes outweigh the 
book itself. 



.64 



CHAPTER XIX 



RARE NATURE 




jlJVIONG the multitude of books 
which find their way to the 
light of my study fire there 
comes, at long intervals, one 
which searches my own con- 
sciousness to the depths and on 
the instant compels my recog- 
nition of that rare creation, a 
true work of art. The inde- 
finable atmosphere, the incommunicable 
touch, of perfection are about and upon 
it, and one is suddenly conscious of a new 
and everlasting possession for the race. 
Such a book lies open before me ; it is 
the " Journal Intime " of Henri Frederic 
Amiel. "There is a point of perfection 
in art," says La Bruyere, " as there is 
of goodness and ripeness in nature ; he 
who feels and loves it has perfect taste ; 
he who feels it not, and who loves some- 
i6s 



thing beneath or beyond it, has faulty 
taste." The perfection which I feel in 
this book is something deeper and di\ incr 
than taste ; it is a matter of soul, and must 
therefore remain undescribed. Like the 
flawless line of beauty, it will instantly 
reveal itself to those who have the instinct 
for art, and to those who fail to perceive 
it at the first glance it will remain forever 
invisible. There is in some natures a 
quality of ripeness which makes all the 
hard processes of growth sweet and, in the 
general confusion of this workshop stage 
of life, gives us a sudden glimpse of per- 
fection. Not that Amiel was a man of 
symmetrical character or life ; in neither 
of these two master lines of action did he 
achieve anything like complete success ; 
to himself, as to his best friends, he was 
but a promise, and at his death it seemed 
as if even the promise had failed. Never- 
theless there was in this man of infirm 
will and imperfect development a qualitv 
of soul which must be counted rare at all 
times, and which, in this present era of 
bustle and energy, brings something of the 
surprise of a revelation with it. These 
i66 



disconnected and unmethodical medita- 
tions, extending over a period of thirty- 
three years, are a kind of subtle distillation 
of life in which one feels in its finer 
essence the whole body of modern thinking 
and feeling. This "Journal Intime" is 
the sole fruit of a period of time long 
enough to contain the activities of a whole 
generation ; but how much more significant 
is the silence of such a book than the 
articulate speech of great masses of men! 
It is something that, at the bottom of this 
great restless ocean of modern life, such a 
pearl as this lay hid. 

Amiel stands for a class of men of 
genius, of keenly receptive and intensely 
sensitive temperament ; men like Joubert 
and Maurice de Guerin, whose lives are 
as rich on the side of thought as they are 
unproductive on the side of action. Such 
men teach almost as much through their 
defects as through their strength. Perhaps 
it is true that the quality of ripeness one 
finds in such natures is due to a preponder- 
ance of the ideal sufficient to destroy the 
balance of character. Men of this fibre 
absorb experience, and produce only scant- 
167 



ily, but their production has an unmistak- 
able stamp upon it ; they are not interpreters 
of universal life, but they slowly distil 
from life a i'ew truths of luminous quality. 
They recall the profound saying of Alfred 
de Musset, that it takes a great deal of life 
to make a little art ; the movement of a 
generation yields them a few meditations, 
but somehow these seem to open every- 
thing up and to make us feel how precious 
is thought, since such a vast range of 
action is needed to give it adequate and 
complete expression. After Napoleon has 
stormed through Europe and filled the 
world with the dust and uproar of change, 
a quiet thinker, living and dying far from 
the current of events, interprets for us the 
two or three ideas which gave the sword 
of the soldier its only significance and 
dignity. 

There are a few eternal elements in 
life, but these are hidden for the most part 
bv the dust of traffic and travel. Men 
hurry to and fro in search of truth, and are 
unconscious that it shines over them with 
the lustre of a fixed star if they would 
keep silent for a little, and let the air 



clarify itself, and the heavens become 
visible once more. No life gains its per- 
fect poise without action, but in the exag- 
gerated emphasis laid upon works of hand 
in this Western world one is often tempted 
at times by the silent solicitation of the 
meditative East. There, in the hush of 
thought, men have always been conscious 
of their souls, and, if they have fallen into 
the tideless sea of pantheism, have at least 
been delivered from the hard and dusty 
ways of materialism. The just balance of 
life among us is preserved by such men as 
Amiel ; men who keep apart from crowds 
and in the perpetual presence of the ever- 
lasting verities. There is in such men a 
wonderful freshness of thought, which 
makes us conscious of the arid atmosphere 
in which most of us work and suffocate. 
Life is old only to those who live in its 
conventions and formulas ; the soil is ex- 
hausted only for those whose ploughshare 
turns the shallow furrow. To all others 
it is still fresh with undiscovered truth, 
still inexhaustible in the wealth with which 
the Infinite Mind has stored it, as the 
Infinite hand has filled its veins with gold 
169 



and its mountains with iron. Amiel's life 
was not one of those overflowing rivers 
which make continents blossom as they 
sweep to the sea ; it was rather one of 
those deep wells which are fed by hidden 
rills, into which a few stars shine with 
strange lustre, and which have power to 
assuaee the thirst of the soul. 



170 




CHAPTER XX 

THE CUCKOO STRIKES TWELVE 

F Rosalind were here," I said 
to myself, as I gave the fire 
a vigorous stirring — "if 
Rosalind were here, the fire 
would burn with better 
heart." Everything takes 
advantage of Rosalind's 
absence ; the house is less friendly and 
hospitable, and has become at times neglect- 
ful of the soothing ministration of a home 
to one's unconscious longings for mute 
companionship ; the study has lost some- 
thing which I cannot define, but the going 
of which has carried the charm of the 
place with it ; even here the fire, which 
has been cheerful in all weathers, and set 
a persistent glow on the front of the 
sullen days, is sluggish and faint-hearted. 
" Why should I sing and shine if there 
is no face to put a halo about ? " it 
171 



seems to mutter to itself as the sticks 
fall apart and the blaze smoulders again 
for the twentieth time. It is a still wintry 
night, and one cannot resist the mood 
which bears him on into the silence and 
solitude of meditation. Without, the lonely 
stars watch the lonely earth across the 
abysses of space which nothing traverses 
save the invisible feet of light. The 
moon is waning below the horizon which 
shows yet no silvery token of its coming ; 
the earth sleeps under the ancient spell of 
winter. One is driven back on himself by 
a world which, for the time, is as mute as 
if birds had never sung, nor forest rustled, 
nor brook prattled. One is driven back 
upon himself, and finds the society neither 
stimulating nor agreeable. There are 
times when one is excellent company for 
one's self, but not on such a night as this, 
when the house is deserted, and the fire 
watches for a chance to go out. 

I suspect that the companionship of the 
open fire is, after all, a negative thing ; an 
accompaniment to which one's own mood 
furnishes the theme that is always elabo- 
rated and expanded. If you are cheerful, 
17a 



your fire sings to you ; if you are overcast, 
its faint and melancholy glow makes the 
clouds that encompass more threatening. It 
rises or sinks with your mood, and its song 
strikes the major or the minor tone accord- 
ing to the pitch of your thought. The 
man who can cheerfully " toast his toes " 
in all weathers will never lack a servile fire 
to flatter his self-satisfaction. Such a man 
is always housed against the storm ; he is 
never abroad with the tempests. His little 
capital of life and love is a buried treasure 
which will not be lost in any venture ; it 
feeds no large desire, sustains no noble 
hope, is multiplied into no wealth that may 
be divided and subdivided until it makes 
the many rich. The miserly man is of all 
men the most unlucky when he counts his 
fortune by the light of the solitary fire. It 
is all there; he touches everv shining piece 
and knows that it is safe. But where are 
those greater possessions which yield the 
priceless revenues of love and happiness ? 
They are gained only by those who make 
great ventures ; who invest all their hope 
and joy for the sake of the larger return 
which this inherited wealth, fortunately 
173 




invested, secures. It is a great risic ; but 
what large adventure, what splendid 
achievement, comes unattended with risk ? 
He only is perfectly secure from loss who 
hoards his treasure until it corrupts itself 
for want of use. On the other hand, as 
Lessing has said, he makes noble ship- 
wreck who is lost in seeking worlds. It is 
174 



better to go down on the great seas which 
human hearts were made to sail than to rot 
at the wharves in ignoble anchorage. It 
is far better to put one's whole life into 
some noble venture of love or service than 
to sit at home with slippered feet always on 
the fender. 

" If Rosalind were here," I said to my- 
self again, " this fire would surely need less 
frequent stirring." When I laid the poker 
down and settled myself for further medi- 
tation, the blaze suddenly kindled and 
brought the whole room into cheerful 
relief. In the ruddy light my eyes caught 
the title of a famous book whose pages are 
often open in my hand. It was like com- 
ing unexpectedly upon a friend when one 
thought one's self alone. I took it from 
its place and let it fall open upon my knee, 
where the dancing light wove arabesques 
of gold about the text, as the monks in the 
scriptorium once intertwined the black 
letter with the glory of bird and flower. 
It was a wonderful book which lav there 
open to the fire; a book wiiich is "the 
precious life-blood of a master-spirit, im- 
balm'd and treasur'd up on purpose to a 
175 



life beyond life;" a book deep almost as 
thought and great almost as life. I did 
not read the lines that were clearly legible 
on my knee ; the great book seemed to 
speak its whole message without words. 
I recalled the story of the man that wrote 
it ; I followed him step by step through his 
stormy and arduous life ; I remembered all 
his losses and sacrifices ; I understood as 
never before the completeness of his self- 
surrender. He had been a world-seeker ; 
he had missed the lower comforts of life; 
for him the alien stars had burned, but not 
the cheerful fire of unadventurous ease. 
Had he made shipwreck ? If he had, his 
going down had strewn the shores of all 
time with a wreckage so precious that it 
had made the whole world rich. This 
man had put his whole life of happiness 
into two great ventures ; he had risked all 
for love, and again he had risked all for the 
citv that bore him ; and his was a double 
loss. Of his splendid fortune of personal 
happiness there remained but a beatific 
vision and a lifelong devotion scorned and 
rejected. Surely it were better to live at 
ease with one's self and one's fire than 
176 



tempt fortune thus ! But then, I thought, 
are not the man and the book and the 
vision and the great life to be reckoned in 
the full accounting ? Out of the bitter 
root of personal loss and sorrow these 
immortal flowers have bloomed ! 

" If Rosalind were here," I said to the 
fire, which was now burning cheerfully, 
" she would show us the heart of this 
matter." And as I fell to thinking about 
her again, I saw how manifold are the 
workings of the law that man must lose 
his life if he would find it, must give him- 
self if he would really possess himself. I 
recalled one by one the books that had 
spoken to me in the crises of my life, or 
had been mv companions when the road 
ran straight and sunny before me, and I 
understood that, one and all, these were 
the returns from great ventures, the rewards 
of great risks. I saw that these great 
spiritual and intellectual treasures had been 
gotten on many shores, plucked from the 
depths of many seas ; that no man is ever 
rich enough to divide with his fellows or 
bequeath to posterity unless he puts his 
heart into some great affection, and his 

12 177 




whole thought into some great enterprise. 
llie men who sit at home have neither 
beneticiaries nor heirs ; they possess nothing 
but their poverty, and that vanishes 
with them when death makes up 
the impartial account. After all, 
I said to myself, no one is ever 
poor who has once been rich ; 
for the real return of a great ven- 
ture is in the expansion and enrich- 
ment of one's own nature ; and 
that cannot fl\ from us as the shy 
bird happiness so often escapes 
into the upper skv whence it came 
to build its fragile nest in our 
hearts. To have done some great 
service and felt the thrill of it, is 
enough to remember when the 
hour is passed and the deed forgot- 
ten ; to have poured one's whole 
life into some great aH'ection is 
never to be impoverished again. 
After the beautiful face became 
first a beautiful memory and then 
a heavenly vision, the poet was 
ne\'er again alone ; in all his 
arduous wanderings there was with 
178 



him one whose footfall in Paradise all 
the world has listened to hear. Love is 
the only synonym in any earthly speech 
for immortality ; it has no past, for it 
carries all that it has been in its heart ; 
and it has no future, for it already realises 
its own completeness and finality. To 
have seen once the heart of a pure, 
loyal, and noble nature is to have gained 
an imperishable possession. 

Just then the silence in which I sat was 
broken ; the cuckoo flew out of his little 
door and chaunted twelve cheerful notes. 
" It makes all the difference in the world," 
I said to myself, " how you report the 
flight of time. You may have a hammer 
ring the hours for you on hard and reso- 
nant metal, or you may cage a bird and set 
the years to music." And I remembered 
how long that tiny song had broken on my 
ears ; how it had blended with the first 
thrilling, articulate crv of life, and how it 
had kept record of hours of great agonies 
and joys. Through the darkness as the 
light, its cheerful song had set the days 
and years to an impartial music. Did I 
dream then, as I listened, before the dying 

1/9 



fire, to the echoes of the vanished years, 
that a bird flew out of Paradise, and, alone 
of all the heavenly brood, returned no 
more, but built its nest along the ways of 
men, seeking always for one to whom its 
divine song should be audible ; and that, 
having heard that thrilling note, the chosen 
ones heard no other sound, but followed 
whithersoever the song led them, and knew 
that at the end it would not die out in the 
evening sky ! "If Rosalind were here," I 
said to the fire as I covered the warm coals 
for the night — "if Rosalind were here — " 



[80 



CHAPTER XXI 



A GLIMPSE OF SPRING 

A -v COKING out of the study 

inTlii ,''^^ . windows this morning, Rosa- 

' 'M V^*- "> 1'"^ noticed a sudden change 

in the group of willows on the 

hill. There was a 

'-X III ^WWA of fresh colour in the mass 




^•^^^ hill. There was a tinge 

v>f twigs which we recog- 
\ nised as the earliest har- 
-^ binger of spring. In the 
sky there was a momentary softness of tone 
which turned the dial of thought forward 
on the instant, and we waited expectant 
for the reedy note that should tell us of the 
coming of the birds and the freshness of 
the early summer on the woods and hills. 
The illusion lasts but a moment, for the 
March winds are rising, and the gray 
clouds will soon overshadow the sky. But 
fancy has been loosened, and will not 
return to its wonted subjection to the work 




of the day. The subject one is studying is 
flat, stale, and unprofitable ; one no sooner 
settles down to it than the fragrance of the 
apple blossom, borne from some silent field 
of memory or from some sunny orchard of 
the imagination, turns all the eager search for 
knowledge into ashes. When such a mood 
comes, as come it will when prophecies of 
spring are abroad, it is better to yield to the 
spell than to make a futile resistance. 

There is a volume close at hand which 
fits the day and the mood. It is Richard 
JefFeries's " Field and Hedgerow," the last 
word of one through whose heart and hand 



so much of the ripe loveliness of the 
English summer passed into English speech. 
One has but to open its pages and he finds 
himself between the blossoming hedges 
waiting for that thrilling music which lies 
hidden with the nightingale in the copse. 
I give myself up to the spell of this beauti- 
ful book, and straightway I am loitering in 
the wheat fields ; I cross the old bridge 
where the once busy wheel has grown 
decrepit and moss-covered with age j I 
stroll through the deer park, shaded by 
venerable oaks ; I pause at last in the old 
village where the repose and quaintness of 
an earlier and more rustic age still linger. 
Every flower, every grass, every tree, every 
bird, is known to my companion ; and he 
knows, also, every road and by-path. 
Nothing escapes his eye, nothing eludes 
the record of hi« memorv : " Acres of per- 
fume come on the wind from the black and 
white of the bea;. field ; the firs fill the air 
bv the copse with perfume. I know 
nothing to which the wind has not some 
happy use. Is there a grain of dust so 
small the wind shall not find it out ? 
Ground in the mill-wheel of the centuries, 
183 



the iron of the distant mountain floats like 
gossamer, and is drank up as dew by leaf 
and living lung. A thousand miles ot 
cloud go by from morn till night, passing 
overhead without a sound ; the immense 
packs, a mile square, succeed to each other, 
side by side, laid parallel, book-shape, com- 
ing up from the horizon and widening as 
they approach. From morn till night the 
silent footfalls of the ponderous vapours 
travel overhead, no sound, no creaking of 
the wheels and rattling of the chains ; it is 
calm at the earth ; but the wind labours 
without an effort above, with such ease, 
with such power. Gray smoke hangs on 
the hillside where the couch-heaps are 
piled, a cumulus of smoke ; the wind 
comes, and it draws its length along like 
the genii from the earthen pot ; there leaps 
up a great red flame, shaking its head ; it 
shines in the bright sunlight ; you can see 
it across the valley." 

But, as I read, the moving world about 
me grows vague and indistinct ; I find my- 
self thinking more and more of my com- 
panion. What a glance is his which 
sweeps the horizon and leaves no stir of 
184 



life unnoted ; which follows the bird in its 
flight and detects the instinct which builds 
its nest and evokes its song ; which 
searches the field and records every change 
in the tiny flower of the grass ! How 
spacious must be the mind, how full the 
heart, how self-centred the life, when one 
matches with the immeasurable beauty of 
the world the genius which searches the 
heart of it all ! This man surely must see 
his own way clear, must hold his own 
course without doubt or question, must 
need no aid of human recognition, while 
his eye sees with such unerring clearness 
and his heart beats with the heart of nature 
herself! Was it so with JefFeries ? I turn 
from the book and recall the story of his 
long, heroic struggles with poverty, ending 
at last in a great agony of disease and 
death. Not quite three years ago he wrote : 
" I received letters from New Zealand, 
from the United States, even from the 
islands of the Pacific, from people who had 
read my writings. It seemed so strange 
that I should read these letters, and yet all 
the time be writhing in agony.'' " With 
truth I think I may say that there are few, 
185 



very few, perhaps none, living who have 
gone through such a series of diseases. 
There are many dead — many who have 
killed themselves for a tenth part of the 
pain ; there are few living." And a friend 
has written of him : '' Who can picture the 
torture of these long years to him, denied 
as he was the strength to walk so much as 
one hundred yards in the world he loved 
so well? What hero like this, Hghting 
with Death face to face so long, fearing 
and knowing, alas ! too well, that no strug- 
gles could avail, and, worse than all, that 
his dear ones would be left friendless and 
penniless? Thus died a man whose name 
will he first, perhaps forever, in his own 
special work." I turn to the last words 
written by his pen three years ago this 
spring : " I wonder to myself how they 
can all get on without me ; how they 
manage, bird and flower, without me, to 
keep the calendar for them. . . . They 
go on without me, orchis-flower and cow- 
slip. I cannot number them all. I hear, 
as it were, the patter of their feet — flower 
and buds, and the beautiful clouds that go 
over, with the sweet rush of rain and burst 
i86 



of sun-glory among the leafy trees. They 
go on, and I am no more than the least of 
the empty shells that strew the sward of the 
hill." He has told the heart of his story 
in a sentence : " Three great giants are 
against me : disease, despair, and poverty." 
These terrible words, in which the utter- 
most agony of a human soul speaks, blot 
out for the moment the vision of fair fields 
and golden weather ; and one closes the 
book and falls to thinking. The story is 
an old one ; it has been told of many a 
great heart whose work freights these cases 
with the weight of immortal thought ; and 
it is the consciousness that these teachers 
and singers, these strong, unconquerable 
spirits, these loval, aspiring souls, have 
shared with us the common lot of men, 
have suffered and despaired with the great 
army of humanity, which gives their works 
sustaining power. These books, in which 
we read the story of our own lives, were 
not the work of demi-gods secluded from 
the uncertainty and bitterness of human 
fortune in some serene world of art ; our 
weaknesses, our irresolution, our tempta- 
tions, our blindnesses and misgivings, were 
187 



theirs also. And if they have held to the 
truth of their visions and the reality of 
their ideals, it has not been because they 
escaped the common lot, but because they 
held their way through it with unshaken 
resolution. Genius does not separate its 
possessors from their fellows ; it makes 
them the more human by its power to 
uncover the deeps of experience, to unlock 
the innermost chambers of the heart, to 
enter into all that life is and means, not 
onlv to one's self but to humanity. No 
human soul that comes to full self-knowl- 
edge escapes the penalty of growth into 
truth and power: the penalty of pain, of 
doubt and uncertainty, of misconceptions 
of spirit and purpose ; of bitter struggle to 
make hard facts the helpers in the search 
and strife for freedom and fulness of life; 
of long waiting ; of the sense of loneliness 
among one's fellows ; of the slow achieve- 
ment through faith and patience. 

It has been said that the pathos of 
antique life lay in the contrast between the 
beauty of the world and man's few and 
broken years ; and that the pathos of 
mediaeval life lay in the contrast between 



the same beauty become a manifold tempta- 
tion, and the soul of man, a stranger amid 
its shows and splendours, lodged in a cell 
while the heavens were blue, scourged and 
fasting while birds and wind sang the 
universal song of joy and freedom. The 
pathos of all time and life is the contrast 
jetween the illimitable thirst and the un- 
satisfying draught, between the flying ideal 
and the lagging real, between the dream 
and the accomplishment, between aspira- 
tion and capacity and power on the one 
hand, and change, limitation, disease, and 
death on the other. Literature knows this 
pathos but too well ; the pathos to which 
no great soul and no great life is ever alien. 
The book has long since slipped from 
my hand, and a sombre shadow seems to 
have quenched the glow of the fire. Out 
of the window the world lies cold and 
cheerless ; bitter winds are abroad ; the 
leaden sky is hidden by a flurry of snow. 
Winter is supreme everywhere. But the 
faint colour on the willows silently speaks 
of softer skies and golden weather. 




iSftk. 



rrf 



H^j-' 






189 



CHAPTER XXII 




with 
habits 



PR I MEVAL MOOD 

r{ 

.HE early spring days 
come treightecl with 
strange, vague longings; 
there is in them some 
subtle breath of the 
unconHned, universal 
life-spirit, which hlls us 
momentary antagonism to all our 
customs, and occupations, and 



inspires us with a desire to be free of all 
obligations, duties, and responsibilities. The 
primitive lawlessness in our blood seems to 
stir dimly with the first movements of life 
under the sod and within the silence of the 
woods. Some long-forgotten existence, 
antedating all our institutions and the very 
beginnings of society, is dimly reflected in 
the depths of consciousness, and makes us 
restless with desire to repossess ourselves 
ot a lost knowledge, to recover a whole 
190 



epoch of primitive experience faded to the 
vaguest of shadows in the memory. 

1 am iKJt sure that Rosalind will enter 
into this mood, or that, if she should, she 
would think it profitable or helpful. I keep 
it to myself, therefore ; feeling quite safe, 
within the circle of light which falls from 
the shaded lamp about her, from all hea- 
thenish and uncivilised impulses. Indeed, 
1 think it would be better if we could feel, 
amid our intense activities to-da\', a little 
more of the pulse oi' the free and trustful 
life which lies like a forgotten page at the 
beginning of the great volume of human 
history. Progress and civilisation are nor- 
mal, healthful, inevitable; it takes very 
little knowledge and thought to detect the 
fundamental error in Rousseau's theories 
of the natural state of man, or in the occa- 
sional play of intellectual wilfulness which 
declares for barbarism as more normal and 
noble than civilisation. Nevertheless, there 
are certain things which men are likely to 
lose in the swift movement of modern life 
which have always been among their best 
possessions. Freshness of perception, a 
sensitive mental retina, openness to the 
191 



unobtrusive but wonderfully significant pro- 
cession of star and flower and storm-cloud 
— these are among the precious things 
which men have largely lost by the way. 
The intense introspection of modern life 
has given us a marvellously rich literature 
of subjective observation and meditation ; 
but we are in danger of missing the fresh- 
ness, the jov, the poetic impressiveness of 
the world that lies within the empire of 
the senses. This thought was in Words- 
worth's mind when he wrote that profound 
and moving sonnet : 

•* The world is too much with us; late and soon, 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our 
powers : 
Little we see in Nature that is ours ; 

We have given our hearts away, a sordid 
boon ! 
This sea that bares her bosom to the moon ; 
The winds that will be howling at all 
hours 
And are up-gather'd now like sleeping 
flowers — 
For this, for everything, we are out of tune ; 
It moves us not. Great God ! I 'd rather be 
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn, 
192 



So might I, standing on this pleasant lea. 
Have glimpses that would make me less 
forlorn ; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea. 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed 
horn." 

The note of revolt in these striking 
lines is not unfamiliar to men and women 
in whom the poetic mood survives and at 
times asserts itself with the momentary 
tyranny of a king who has forgotten that 
he is dethroned. In every healthful nature 
there must be an outlet into the ancient 
life of fresh impressions, of senses still 
unsubdued to the work of the calculating 
intellect, of impulses still vigorous with 
unspent vitality. It is to satisfy this crav- 
ing than some men find themselves drawn 
irresistibly at times to the Odyssey, with 
its free, fresh life of movement and action ; 
it is because the great race legends of the 
Scandinavian, the German, and the Celt 
have this breath of the morning upon them 
that they take possession of the imagination 
and stir such vague but passionate responses 
within us. It is to satisfy this craving, no 
doubt, that a young poet now and then 
3 193 



gives rein to his imagination, and celebrates 
his freedom in verse better suited to 
Bacchic and other lost pagan moods than 
to modern ears ; and, recalling the exuber- 
ant vitality of such a youth as Goethe's 
before it had learned that obedience is the 
only road to freedom, we are not surprised 
to hear him say to Merck in the early 
Weimar days: "We are somewhat mad 
here, and play the devil's own game." 

While I had been letting my thoughts 
run in this riotous fashion Rosalind had 
been intently reading Maurice de Guerin. 
Suddenly she looked up from the book and 
read aloud some striking sentences from 
that exquisite piece of poetic interpretation, 
the " Centaur." The old Centaur is tell- 
ing the story of his wonderful earlv life, 
with its seclusion, its unfettered freedom, 
its kinship with nature, its nearness to the 
gods. There is in the storv a deep sin- 
cerity, a simplicity, a strange familiarity 
with the secrets and mysteries of nature, 
which never cease to touch me as a kind 
of new power in literature. The Centaur 
describes his wild, far wanderings through 
the deep valleys and along the mountain 
194 



summits until the evening shadows begin 
to fill the recesses of the remoter hills. 
" But when Night, filled with the charm 
of the gods, overtook me on the slopes of 
the mountain, she guided me to the mouth 
of the caverns, and there tranquillised me 
as she.tranquillises the billows of the sea. 
Stretched across the threshold of my retreat, 
my flanks hidden within the cave, and my 
head under the open sky, I watched the 
spectacle of the dark. The sea gods, it is 
said, quit during the hours of darkness their 
places under the deep ; they seat themselves 
on the promontories, and their eyes wander 
over the expanse of the waves. Even so 
I kept watch, having at my feet an expanse 
of life like the hushed sea. My jegards 
had free range, and travelled to the most 
distant points. Like sea beaches which 
never lose their wetness, the line of moun- 
tains to the west retained the imprint of 
gleams not perfectly wiped out by the 
shadows. In that quarter still survived, in 
pale clearness, mountain summits naked 
and pure. There I beheld at one time the 
god Pan descend ever solitary ; at another, 
the choir of the mystic divinities ; or I saw 
I9S 



some mountain nymph charm-struck by 
the night. Sometimes the eagles ot" Mount 
Olympus traversed the upper sky, and 
were lost to view among the far-ofF con- 
stellations, or in the shade of the dreaming 
forests." 

I cannot describe the eloquence of these 
words as Rosalind read them, with rising 
colour and deepening tone ; the eloquence 
of the imagination narrating the past, and 
making its most wondrous forms live 
again. The secret of the Centaur perished 
with him, but not the charm of his life. 
The wild, free range of being, with vision 
of descending deities and spell-bound 
nymphs ; the fellowship with mighty forces 
that science has never tamed ; the sway of 
impulses that rise out of the vast uncon- 
scious life of nature — these still penetrate 
at times our habits and occupations, and 
find our hearts fresh and responsive. It is 
then that we draw away from men for a 
season, and become one of those 
of whom the same wise Centaur 
>-_^ I said that they had " picked up 
i^V <*-T^ ^ on the waters or in the 



!!v^ 




i- Y^% , woods, and carried to their 



lips, some pieces of the reed pipe thrown 
away by the god Pan. fVom that hour 
these mortals, having caught from their 
relics of the god a passion for wild life, or 
perhaps smitten with some secret madness, 
enter into the wilderness, plunge among the 
forests, follow the course of the streams, 
bury themselves in the heart of the moun- 
tains, restless, and haunted by an unknown 
purpose." 




197 



CHAPTER XXIII 




THE METHOD OF GENIUS 

OSALIND had been so absorbed 
in readijig Mr. Lowell's essay 
on Gray that she had not noted 
the slow sinking of the fire ; 
it was only when she had 
finished that noble piece 
of criticism and laid aside 
the volume that she became suddenly con- 
scious of her lapse of duty, and began to 
make vigorous reparation for her oversight. 
For a moment the flame crept cautiously 
along the edges of the wood ; and then, 
taking heart from glowing fellowship, sud- 
denly burst into full blaze and answered 
the roaring wind without with its own note 
of defiance, I sat quietly behind my desk, 
enjoying the various charming pictures, 
framed in mingled light and shadow, which 
Rosalind's struggle with the fire seemed to 
198 



project into the room. I am sure that the 
charm is in her, and that the illusive play 
of imagination, the soft and wandering 
glow touching now a book and now a 
picture, the genial warmth which pervades 
the place, are really a subtle materialisation 
of her qualities. For me at least, the fire 
loses its gentle monotone of consolation 
when her face is not transfigured by it, and 
I enjoy it most when I feel most deeply 
that it is but a symbol of that which she 
has added to my life. 

I was saying that Rosalind had been 
reading Mr. Lowell's essay on Gray. 
When she had stirred the smouldering 
flame into a blaze, she opened the book 
again and read aloud here and there a 
luminous criticism, or one of those perfect 
felicities of style which thrill one as with a 
sudden music. When she had finished 
she said, with a half-sigh : " I am sure 
there can be but one pleasure greater than 
the reading of such a piece of work, and 
that is the writing of it. Why does it 
kindle my imagination so powerfully ? why 
does it make everything I have read lately 
seem thin and cold ? " 
199 




vf 



There is a soft glow on her face as she 
asks this question, which I cannot help 
thinking is the most charming tribute ever 
paid even to Mr. Lowell, a writer fortunate 
beyond most men of genius in the recogni- 
tion of his contemporaries. The question 
and the face tempt me awav from desk and 
200 



my task, and invite me to the easy-chair 
from whence I have so often studied the 
vagaries of the restless Hrc. Rosalind's 
question goes to the very heart of the 
greatest of the arts, and has a personal 
interest because she takes as her text one 
of the best known and best loved of the 
friends whose silent speech make this room 
eloquent. The second series of " Among 
My Books " lies on the desk at my hand, 
and as I open it at random the eye falls on 
these words from the essay on Dante : 
" The man behind the verse is far greater 
than the verse itself, and the impulse he 
gives to what is deepest and most sacred 
in us, though we cannot always explain it, 
is none the less real and lasting. Some 
men always seem to remain outside their 
work ; others make their individuality felt 
in every part of it — their very life vibrates 
in every verse, and we do not wonder that 
it has ' made them lean for many years.' 
The virtue that has gone out of them 
abides in what they do. The book such a 
man makes is indeed, as Milton called it, 
' the precious life-blood of a master spirit.' 
Theirs is a true immortality, for it is their 



soul, and not their talent, that survi\es in 
their work." 

" There," I said, " is the answer to 
your question from the only person who 
can speak with authority on that matter. 
What you feel in that essay on Gray, and 
what I always feel in reading Lowell, is 
not the skill of a marvellously trained hand, 
but the movement of a large, rich nature 
to whom life speaks through the whole 
range of experience, and who has met that 
constant inflow of truth with a quiet 
nobleness of mind and heart. Mr. Lowell 
seems to me pre-eminently the man of 
genius as distinguished from the man of 
talent ; the man, that is, who holds heart 
and mind in close, unconscious fellowship 
with the whole movement of life, as 
opposed to the man who attempts to get 
at the heart of these things by intellectual 
dexterity. The great mass of writing is 
done by men of talent, and that is the rea- 
son why this account of Gray makes what 
vou have been reading lately seem cold and 
thin. There is in this essay a vein of gold 
of which Mr. Lowell is perhaps uncon- 
scious ; it is the presence of his own 



nature which gives his piece of criticism 
that indescribable quahty which every 
human soul recognises at once as a new 
revelation of itself. 

"The man of talent is simply a trained 
hand, a dexterity which can be turned at 
will in any direction ; this is the kind of 
literary faculty which abounds just now, 
and is so sure of itself that it denies the 
very existence of genius. The man of 
genius, on the other hand, is a large, rich 
nature, with an ear open to every whisper 
of human experience, and a heart that 
interprets the deepest things to itself before 
they have become conscious in the thought. 
The man of genius lives deeply, widelv, 
royally ; and the best expression he ever 
gives of himself is but a faint echo of the 
world-melodies that fill his soul. When 
such a man writes, he does not draw upon 
a special fund of information and observa- 
tion ; the universe of truth lies about him, 
and rises like an inexhaustible fountain 
within him. One feels in the work of 
such a man as Lowell the presence, to use 
Ruskin's phrase, not of a great effort, but 
of a great force. There is no suggestion 
203 



of limitation, no hint that one has reached 
the end of his resources ; on the contrary, 
there is present the indefinable atmosphere 
of an opulent nature, whose wealth is 
equal to all draughts, and whose capital 
remains unimpaired by the greatest enter- 
prises. Shakespeare was not impoverished 
by ' Hamlet,' nor Goethe by ' Faust.' ' To 
be able to set in motion the greatest sub- 
jects of thought without any sense of 
fatigue,' says Amiel, ' to be greater than 
the world, to play with one's strength — 
this is what makes the well-being of 
intelligence, the Olympic festival of 
thought.' " 

The tire, which had been burning 
meditatively during this discourse, sank 
at this point into a bed of glowing coals, 
and I took breath long enough to replenish 
it with a fresh stick or two. Rosalind 
meanwhile had taken up her sewing. 

" Don't you believe, then, in an art of 
literature apart from hfe .? " she asked. 

" To begin with," I answered, " there 

is no such thing as a separation of art from 

life ; it is modern misconception which 

not only separates them, but sets them in 

204 



contrast. A true art is impossible apart 
from life ; the man of genius always 
restores this lost harmony. The man of 
talent divorces his skill from life, the man 
of genius subordinates his training to the 
truth which s'peaks through him. To him 
art is not mere skill, but that perfect 
reproduction of ideal life which the world 
gains when Pheidias gives it the Olym- 
pian Zeus, Raphael the Sistine Madonna, 
and Dante the Divine Comedy. Mr. 
Lowell is the greatest of our poets because 
his trained hand moves in such subtle 
harmony with his noble thought. He wears 
' all that weight of learning lightly as a 
flower.' The impulses of a man of genius 
come from life ; they are deep, rich, vital ; 
they rise out of the invisible depths of his 
consciousness as the unseen mists rise out 
of the mighty abyss of the sea ; and as the 
clouds take form and become the splendour 
and the nourishment of toiling continents, 
so do these impulses become distinct and 
articulate, and touch life at last with an 
indescribable beauty and strength. On the 
other hand, the impulses of a man of talent 
spring from skill, knowledge, the desire 
205 



and profit of the moment. The deepest 
truth is not born of conscious striving, but 
comes in the quiet hour when a noble 
nature gives itself into the keeping of life, 
to suffer, to feel, to think, and to act as it 
is moved by a wisdom not its own. The 
product of literary skill is a piece of 
mechanism — something made and dexter- 
ously put together in the broad light of the 
workshop ; the work of genius is always a 
miracle of growth, hidden from all eyes, 
nourished and expanded by the invisible 
forces which sustain the universe." 

At this point I became suddenly con- 
scious that mv hobb\' was in full canter, 
and that Rosalind might be the unwilling 
spectator of a solitary race against time. 

" My dear," I said, " your question must 
bear the responsibility of this discourse. 
There are some names so rich in associa- 
tions with one's intellectual life, so sug- 
gestive of the best and truest things, that 
they have a kind of a magical power over 
our minds ; they are open sesames to about 
all there is in us." 



zo6 



CHAPTER XXIV 




A HINT FROM THE 

SEASON 



HIS afternoon, when 
Rosalind came in from 
her walk, she brought 
an indefinable atmos- 
phere of spring with 
, her. I was not sur- 
prised when she said 
that she had seen a bluebird ; I should 
hardly have been surprised if she had told 
me the summer was at our doors, and the 
fire must go out that the hearth might be 
swept and garnished. There are times 
when prophecy is swiftly fulfilled by the 
imagination, and turns into history under 
our very eyes. For days past there have 
been harbingers of change on every hand ; 
and fancy, taking the clues so magically 
dropped here and there in field and sky, 
travels with swift flight onward to the 
songs and flowers of June. This evening 
207 







7^, 



IJ^i^t 






the season has wrought its spell upon us ; 
and while we have listened to the winds 
of March, and watched the shifting outlines 
of the fire, our thoughts have caught some- 
thing of the glow of summer. Rosalind 
has had various house-cleaning plans run- 
ning through her mind, no doubt, but she 
has kept them to herself. I believe in 
the sharing of cares, but I admire, above 
all things, the loving skill which reserves 
the common problems of the household 
for some fit hour, and keeps the evening 
intact for sweeter and more inspiring 
fellowship. I sometimes wonder if a good 
many women do not lose that touch of 
sentiment which is the fragrance of domes- 
tic life, by keeping the machinery too con- 




The supreme charm of a woman is lier atmosphere. 



stantly within sight and hearing ; the whir 
of the wheels must be deadened if the 
fireside is to hear the best talk, and to 
cast its magical glow on the most com- 
plete companionship. The supreme charm 
of a woman is her atmosphere ; and how 
shall that be serene and sunny, touching 
the life of the home with indefinable colour 
and fragrance, if problems and perplexities 
are not kept well in the background ? 
The women whose presence is both rest 
and inspiration are not as numerous as 
they might be if the secret of their charm 
were told abroad. This is a digression, 
but, in the ramble, what moments are so 
delightful as those in which we stray from 
the road to pluck a wild flower, or to find 
a fairer outlook ? 

" I am not sure," said Rosalind, " that 
I should care for perpetual sunshine. One 
values a beautiful thing most when it 
appeals to a fresh percep- 
tion of its charm. I 
don't believe I should 
enjoy summer half so 
much if it were always 
at hand." 

14 209 




I was thinking the same thought, but 
with a different application. I had just 
been reading one of those perverse writers 
who are always sure that their own age is 
the worst in all history, and their own 
country the most depraved in the world. 
If they would only add that they them- 
selves were the most misleading of writers, 
I could offset the truth of the last state- 
ment against the falsehood of the other 
propositions, and feel that something had 
been gained. The particular prophet to 
whose monody I had been gi\ing a few 
moments of half-hearted attention had 
assured me that we have come to the end 
of poetry and all great work of the imagi- 
nation, and have entered upon a period of 
final decadence. All noble dreams of 
idealism have faded, and a dull gray sky is 
henceforth to overarch life and leave it 
cold and colourless. This pessimistic note 
is familiar to all readers of modern books ; 
they have heard it in all keys, and with all 
the varied modulations of literary skill. 
Renan has sung the swan-song of the 
noble idealism of the past in his limpid 
and beguiling French periods, and English 



and American pens have taken up the 
burden of the refrain and set it to a varied 
and seductive music. The swan-song has 
become to many sensitive spirits a veritable 
siren melody, luring them away from all 
noble effort and action. These thoughts 
were in my mind as I gave the fire an 
energetic stirring to express my deep and 
growing aversion to the gospel of disillusion 
which is fast substituting for the prophetic 
dream of the imagination the nightmare of 
despair. 

" I do not understand," I said, as I sank 
back into my easy-chair, " why men who 
write books will not occasionally look out 
of the windows of their libraries and take 
note of the bluebirds and the gleams of 
softened skv. We happen just now to be 
in a period of comparative barrenness in 
poetry. We have had within this present 
century a golden summer of marvellous 
fertility ; one has to go back a good many 
seasons to recall another so prodigal of 
colour, so full of all manner of noble 
fruitage. There has followed a softened 
but beautiful autumn, the aftermath of a 
cloudless day j and now has come the 



inevitable winter of pause, silence, and 
apparent barrenness. Straightway the older 
men, recalling the glorious days of their 
youth, fall to moaning over the final dis- 
appearance of summer; and some of the 
younger men, chilled by the season and 
unable to rekindle the torches that have 
burnt out, join in the tragic chorus, and 
give themselves to the writing of epita-j^hs 
of classical perfection of form and more 
than classical coldness of temper. There 
are times when one feels as if most recent 
poetry had been written solely for mortuary 
purposes. The chill of death is on it; 
one's only consolation in reading it springs 
from the conviction that it is written over 
an empty tomb ; and it must be confessed 
that grief has a hollow sound, even in 
verse of classical correctness, when one 
knows that the death which it laments 
with elegiac elegance has not actually 
taken place. For myself, I confess I am 
so weary of the funeral note of recent 
verse that I have gone back to Shakespeare 
with an almost rapacious appetite. An 
evening on Prospero's Island, with Ariel 
hovering in mid-air, the invisible messenger 



of that Imagination which his master 
embodies, gives me back the old harmonies 
of hope and joy and life. The music of 
the sea that sings round that island is heard 
by few mariners in these melancholy days. 
It is significant that the greatest writers 
are never despondent or despairing. Such 
men as Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe 
were serene and joyous in a world whose 
deeper mysteries were far more real and 
pressing to them than to the minor singers 
of to-day. The trouble is not in the age, 
but in the men. The man who cannot be 
strong, cheerful, creative, in his own age, 
would find all other ages inhospitable and 
barren." 

Here I saw that Rosalind was about to 
speak, if she could get the opportunity, and 
I generously gave it to her. 

" I quite agree with you," was her 
agreeable comment ; " but what did you 
mean by saying at the beginning that 
writers ought to look out of their library 
windows oftener? " 

" I 'm glad you reminded me of my 
text," I answered, " The point of what 
I have been saying was in that remark. 
213 



In the world of thought, imagination, and 
feeling, seed-time and harvest are ordained 
quite as distinctly as in the world of fruits 
and flowers. There are epochs of splendid 
fertility, and there are epochs of sterility. 
It is by no accident that one age is silent 
and the next flooded with melody. The 
tide of creative impulse ebbs and flows 
under a law which has not been discovered ; 
but the return of the tide is no less certain 
than its ebb. Why, then, should men of 
talent wander up and down a beach from 
which the waters have receded, wringing 
their hands and adding a hollow moan to 
the mighty monotone of the sea because 
the tide will return no more ? More than 
once, in other and parallel ages, these 
melancholy cries have been drowned by 
the incoming tides. Life is inexhaustible, 
and he must be blind indeed who does not 
see in the movements of to-dav the possi- 
bilities of a future in which art shall come 
nearer than ever to human hearts, and add 
to its divine revelation of beauty some 
undiscovered loveliness." 



*i4 




CHAPTER XXV 

A BED OF EMBERS 

RE is no event in the house- 
hold hte so momentous as the 
coming of a friend ; it is one 
of the events for which the 
home was built and in which its 
ideal is realised. " The orna- 
ment of a house," savs Emer- 
son, " is the friends who frequent 
it." Their character, culture, aims, 
reveal the law of its being ; whether 
It stands for show, for mere 
luxury, or for large and noble living. 
" Honour to the house where they 
are simple to the verge of hardship ; 
so that there the intellect is awake 
and reads the laws of the universe, 
the soul worships truth and love, 
honour and courtesy flow into all deeds." 
How easy it is to collect handsome furni- 
ture and crowd a house to suffocation with 

215 



things which give one no impression of 
individuality, but only an impression of 
expense ! Elaborate homes abound in 
these days, but for the most part they 
serve mainly to emphasise the vulgarity 
of the people who inhabit them ; an elegant 
house is a dangerous possession for those 
whose social training has not prepared 
them for it. Such homes are not without 
their advantages to the children who grow 
up in them, but the elders are always out 
of place in them. The real charm of a f 
home is the indefinable atmosphere which I 
pervades it, made up of the personalities 
who live in it, of the friends who frequent ( 
it, of the pictures which hang upon its 
walls, the books which lie upon its tables, 
and all its furnishings which disclose taste, 
training, and character. Many elegant 
houses impress one with a painful material- 
ism ; even when all things are in keeping 
there is an elaboration which offends the 
mind bv making too much of bodily com- 
fort and mere physical luxury. The 
highest intellectual and social types are 
not likclv to be developed in such an 
atmosphere ; Attic rather than Asiatic 
216 



influences have inspired the finest social 
life. The first and final impression of a 
house should come, not from furniture, but 
from those material things which stand for 
thought, for beauty, for the ideal. I should 
shrink from creating a home which people 
should remember for its ministration to their 
bodies ; that kind of service can be bought 
at the inn ; I should count myself fortunate 
if my home were remembered for some 
inspiring quality of faith, charity, and 
aspiring intelligence. One cannot write 
about his own home without egotism, for 
it is the best part of himself. If I were 
to write about mine, as I fear I am con- 
stantly doing, I should simply write about 
Rosalind. When I think of what home 
is and means, I understand the absolute 
veracity of Lowell's sentiment that " many 
make the household, but only one the 
home." In every home there is one whose 
nature gives law and beauty to its life ; who 
builds it slowly out of her heart and soul, 
adorns it with the outward and visible 
symbols of her own inward and spiritual 
gifts, and makes it her own by ministra- 
tions not to be weighed and counted, so 
217 



impalpable, so numberless, and so beyond 
all price are they. But of the friends who 
pull one's latch-string and sit before one's 
fire one may speak without offence and 
with infinite satisfaction to himself; the 
coming and going of those who know and 
love us best form the most inspiring 
records in the domestic chronicles. 

Last night the study fire burned late ; 
or rather wc sat by it so late that it was 
only a bed of embers. What a glow 
came from it, and what heat ! The blaze 
of the earlier evening yielded nothing so 
grateful, so beautiful, so full of appeal to 
the memory and the imagination. We 
lingered long, and with deepening joy and 
gratitude ; we seemed to pause for an hour 
between a past rich in memories and a 
future affluent in hopes. We waited for our 
friend to speak, and every time her voice 
broke the silence it seemed to recall some 
half-forgotten phase of a life set to pure 
and beautiful ends, some trait of a natur:i 
full of a sweet strength of mind and heart : 

''^^vV ** A soul serene. Madonna-like, enshrined ( /' 

^^ In her dear self. " ' ' 

zi8 



The embers glowed with a soft and 
genial heat which seemed to make the 
exchange of confidences between us easy 
and natural. Even with those who stand 
nearest to us we can never force one of 
those interchanges of thought which mark 
the very best moments of our lives ; they 
must grow out of the occasion and the 
mood, and they sometimes elude our most 
patient endeavours. In the story of 
" P'aust " Goethe undoubtedly meant to 
say, among other things, that a man does 
not own his soul ; he cannot barter it for 
any price, because it belongs to God. It 
is certain that the deeper self which we 
call the soul does not hold itself at our 
beck and call. There are hours when it 
is inaccessible, although we make strenuous 
effort to reach it ; when it is dumb, 
although we urge it to speak. But at the 
moment when we least expect such happi- 
ness, it suddenly reveals itself to us, and 
to that other whose atmosphere, whose 
gift or grace or accent, has somehow won 
its confidence and inspired it with utter- 
ance. There have been moments like this 
in our history which seem to be, as we 
ZI9 



look back, the real events in our lives — 
those events which ha\ c made us acquainted 
with our own natures, and held open the 
door of life at the same time. The glow- 
ing embers sent a warm thrill into our 
very hearts, and in that warmth our 
thoughts seemed to flow together. Then, 
for the first time, I understood the real 
sentiment of that residuum of fire and heat 
which the flame leaves behind it. The 
heart of the fire survives the perishing of 
the material which fed it ; that has van- 
ished, but its soul of heat and light remains, 
a beautiful afterglow. In some kindred 
sense friendship is the survival of the 
perishable element of the years that are 
gone ; actions, experiences, words, are 
mostly forgotten, but the trust, faith, affec- 
tion, that grew out of and through these 
remain to give light and warmth to the 
later time. The past that has burned out, 
like the flame of the earlier evening, sur- 
vives in these glowing embers, radiating 
heat and light. 

As the embers form the residuum of 
that which is gone, so do they make the 
surest foundation for future activity and 




The glowing c-mbL-rs sent a warm tlirill into our very hearts. 



beauty. I have but to lay a (ew sticks 
across these coals, and immediately the 
blaze is kindled ; there lies the compressed 
force of fire. There are hearths on which 
the glow never dies ; it is kindled and 
rekindled day after day, until it becomes a 
continuous fire from season's end to sea- 
son's end. Like the ancient hearth-fires 
from which the Greek emigrants carried 
embers when they parted from the over- 
crowded community, these fires light each 
new day and each succeeding month with 
something from the warmth and glow of 
the dav and the month that are gone, 
friendship carries into the future whatever 
was best and truest in our past relation- 
ships ; whatever could be detached from 
the perishable forms in which our lives 
express and manifest themselves. Each 
year adds to the accumulations of the past, 
and levels still more these invisible walls 
which separate us. The solitude of life is 
known to us all ; for the most part we are 
alone, and the voices of friends come onlv 
faint and broken across the impassable 
gulfs which surround every human soul. 
No one has felt the pathos of this solitude 

221 



more keenly or given it a more deeply 
poetic expression than Matthew Arnold : 

'* Yes ! in the sea of life enisled. 

With echoing straits between us thrown. 
Dotting the shoreless watery wild. 

We mortal millions live alone. 
The islands teel the enclasping flow. 
And then their endless bounds they know. 

" But when the moon their hollows lights. 
And they are swept by balms of spring. 
And in their glens, on starry nights, 

The nightingales divinely sing ; 
And lovely notes, from shore to shore. 
Across the sounds and channels pour — 

'* Oh ! then a longing like despair 
Is to their farthest caverns sent ; 
For surely once, they feel, we were 

Parts of a single continent ! 
Now round us spreads the waterv plain — ■ 
Oh, might our inarges meet again ! 

" Who order'd that their longing's fire 

Should be, as soon as kindled, cool'd ? 
Who renders vain their deep desire ? 

A God, a God their severance ruled ! 
And bade betwixt their shores to be 
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea." 



The moods in which the sense of kin- 
ship outweighs the sense of isolation, when 
the balms of spring are in the air, and in 
the solitudes a divine music is heard, come 
oftenest at the bidding of the friend who 
has journeyed with us in the day of action, 
and bivouacked with us when the night of 
sorrow has fallen upon us, swift and awful, 
from the shining skies. There are those 
who were born to be our kinsmen of the 
soul, and whose voice reaches us when all 
other voices fail. " For the rest, which 
we commonly call friends and friendships," 
says the wise Montaigne, " are nothing but 
acquaintance and familiarities, either occa- 
sionally contracted or by some design, by 
means of which there happens some little 
intercourse betwixt our souls ; but in the 
friendship I speak of, they mix and work 
themselves into one piece, with so uni- 
versal a mixture that there is no more sign 
of the seam bv which they were first con- 
joined. If a man should importune me to 
give a reason why I loved him, I find it 
could no otherwise be exprest than by 
making answer, because it was he, because 
it was I. There is beyond I am able to 

-C23 



say, I know not what Inexplicable and fatal 
power that brought on this union." 

As we say good-night we carefully cover 
the embers with ashes, which no longer 
signify desolation, but the husbanding of 
the fire for to-morrow's cheer and warmth. 
P'riendship is always prophetic of the mor- 
row; its past is prophcc\ and promise of 
the morrow. 




CHAPTER XXVI 

A DAY 
OUT OF DOORS 

S I sit looking into the 
study-fii'e my glance rests 
on a pair of snow-shoes on 
the broad chimney breast, 
and straightway fancy flies abroad and 
recalls a glorious day of winter cheer and 
exploit. 

A writer of deep suggestiveness has 
commented on the superior advantages 
of the man on horseback over the man on 
foot ; but this exalted condition, which in 
certain seasons gives one a delicious sense 
of sovereignty, aftbrds neither advantage 
nor charm in the northern climate in mid- 
winter. The man to whom all things are 
possible under these circumstances is the 
man on snow-shoes. He alone holds the 
key of the snow-beleaguered forests ; to him 
alone is intrusted the right of eminent 
domain — the privilege, in other words, 
15 225 



of sc'i'/ing for his own use the lands of his 
neighbours ; he alone owns the landscape. 
Great privileges never go save in company 
with grave responsibilities, and not un- 
frequently with serious perils. No one 
need expect, therefore, to be put into 
possession of the landscape except upon 
conditions more or less formidable. The 
snow-shoe is a delightful feature of decora- 
tion ; how often have we seen it effectively 
displayed against a proper background, and 
straightway, as if a door had been set ajar 
into another clime, the breath of winter 
has been upon us, the splendour of illimit- 
able fields of snow has blinded us, and we 
have seen in a glance the dark line of 
spruce and fire as it climbs the white peak 
against the deep blue horizon line. But 
the snow-shoe has its serious and even 
humiliating aspects. The novice who ties 
it on his moccasin and goes forth for the 
first time in rash and exulting confidence 
is likely to meet with swift and calamitous 
eclipse. He mounts the first inviting drift 
of beautiful snow, only to disappear in a 
humiliation and perplexity from which he 
emerges blinded, breathless, and whiter 

2Z6 




A clear, cold winter's morning. 



than the Polar bear. The unsympathetic 
jeers of his companions complete the dis- 
cipline and stimulate to further catastrophes, 
which in the end work out the peaceful 
results of wisdom and training. But the 
secret once learned, snow-shoeing is thence- 
forth a measureless delight. 

Thoreau declares that in one sense we 
cannot live too leisurely. " Let me not 
live as if time was short. Catch the pace 
of the seasons, have leisure to attend to 
every phenomenon of nature, and to enter- 
tain every thought that comes to you. Let 
your life be a leisurely progress through 
the volumes of nature . . ." To thor- 
oughly enter into the life of nature one 
must accept her mood at the moment, and 
she has as many moods as the mortals who 
seek her companionship ; but with all her 
moods she is never moody. On a sum- 
mer's day the spacious leisure of the forest 
invites one to complete cessation of effort ; 
to that profound repose which sets every 
door ajar for fresh perceptions and new 
influences. But on a clear, cold winter's 
morning a very different spirit is abroad ; 
not repose, but intensity of action, is 



solicited. There lies the great world, 
from which the traces of individual owner- 
ship have been almost obliterated ; who 
will claim it, and enforce his claim with 
absolute possession ? It is in response to 
this inspiring challenge that the man on 
snow-shoes enters the field. If he is made 
of the right stuff he has the air of a great 
proprietor. To him roads and fences and 
all artificial boundary lines are as if they 
were not ; he owns the landscape, and there 
are moments when he feels as if the sky 
had been hung above his wide, free world 
to give him the last and most delicate sen- 
sation of adventure. The great joy of the 
man on snow-shoes is the consciousness 
of freedom. He is released from the 
tyranny of the roads and the impertinent 
intrusion of fences ; places that were once 
forbidden or inaccessible are now open to 
him ; fields given over to the selfishness 
of agriculture are leased to nature for the 
nobler uses of beauty and his personal 
adventure ; there is no secluded pond in 
the woods to which he cannot choose his 
own path ; there is no remote outlook 
across field or swamp to which he cannot 



swiftly make his way. The great drifts, 
the long levels of snow in the open places, 
are so many exhilarating opportunities to 
him, and he accepts the invitation of nature 
to come abroad with her not as an inferior 
but as an equal. 

The snow-shoe is ingeniously devised to 
diffuse man's ponderosity over a larger sur- 
face ; to enable him to go by artifice where 
the natural construction of his body would 
forbid his going. This well devised aid 
to escape from civilisation sets free the 
mind at the same time that it removes a 
physical limitation. The man who cannot 
get away from himself on snow-shoes is a 
galley slave who deserves the oar and will 
never escape from it. But most men 
who find themselves afield so equipped 
cast off^ all bondage of mind to old habits 
and limitations by an effort so natural that 
it is purely unconscious. They are filled 
with an insatiable desire to take deep 
breaths, to penetrate every recess of the 
world about them, to overcome every 
obstacle and leave nothing untried. In 
the vigorous morning air all enterprises are 
open, and one waits neither to count the 
229 



hours nor the difficulties. The earth 
shines like the sky, and a kind of ineffable 
splendour crowns the day. Level field 
and rolling meadow, stretch of lowland 
and sweep of mountain, unbroken surface 
of lake and curving whiteness of river 
losing itself behind the hills — all these 
lie within the vision and invite exploration. 
The dark green masses of pine and spruce 
rest the eve dazzled by the universal 
brilliancy. The mountains have a mar- 
vellous delicacy and charm ; instead of 
presenting a flat surface of dead white 
they reveal a thousand soft and rounded 
outlines ; each tree is individualised and 
stands out in clear and perfect symmetry, 
and every branch and leaf is white with 
exquisite frost work. At sunset, when 
the last tender light of the winter day falls 
on those deep, rich masses of frost tracery, 
one will see a vanishing loveliness as tender 
as the flush of the rose leaf and as ethereal 
as the light of a solitary star when it first 
touches the edges of the hills. The day 
ends in Hesperian splendour. 

But, fortunately, the day is still in its 
prime, and, as one chooses the deepest 
230 



drift and climbs to the top of the nearest 
hill, he wishes it might never end. Arrived 
at the summit, breathless and exultant, he 
looks for the hollow which has caught the 
drifts, and, after a moment's rest, he runs 
swiftly down to the pond below, sliding on 
the crusts, and moving more slowly and 
cautiously over light snow of whose depth 
and yielding quality he has perhaps already 
had sad experience. The level surface of 
the pond lacks that variety which is the 
charm of snow-shoeing, and so one skirts 
the shore and takes the first accessible 
opening into the woods; and now delight 
and danger are mixed in the most delicious 
compound. The remoteness, the silence, 
and the solitude of the winter woods are 
simply enchanting ; the sky is softly blue 
between the "bare, ruined choirs where 
late the sweet birds sang ; " every twig is 
snow-bound, and the only evidence of life 
is the track of the rabbit or the fox. One 
tramps on, jubilant and self-forgetful, until 
suddenly some unseen root catches in the 
interstices of the snow-shoe, and then alas 
for human greatness ! But the disaster is 
only momentary — is, indeed, part of the 
231 



novel and fascinating experience. On 
and on through the deep recesses of the 
forest one makes his way, and at every 
turn some lovely or impressive wintry 
scene frames itself for permanent hanging 
in the memory. Now it is a little snow- 
covered hollow where one is sure the 
mosses grow thick in summer ; now it is a 
solitary tree whose tracery of branches is 
exquisitely etched against the sky ; now it 
is a side hill swiftly descending to the 
narrow brook, the music of whose running 
still lingers softly cadenced in the ear of 
memory; now it is a sudden glimpse of 
the mountains that rise in the wide silence 
and solitude like primeval altars whose 
lofty fires are lighted at sunrise and sunset ; 
and now, as one leaves the forest behind, 
the last picture is the river winding through 
the dark, wild mountain gorge, its waters 
rushing impatient and tumultuous over the 
ice that strives in vain to fetter them. 

The short day is already hurrying to its 
close ; but its brevity has no power over 
the memories one has plucked from wood 
and field. Reluctantly one hurries home- 
ward. The smoke from the little village 
232 



'*^^*'""*^!i»f-»v i^V^.^ti*'** 






m the hollow rises in straight white lines 
above every house, and as one pauses for a 
moment, before descending, to take in the 
picture, one recalls a similar moment of 
which Thoreau has preserved the fleeting 
impression: " The windows on the skirts 
of the village reflect the setting sun with 
intense brilliancy, a dazzling glitter, it is 
so cold. Standing thus on one side of the 
hill, 1 begin to see a pink light reflected 
from the snow about fifteen minutes before 
233 



the sun sets. This gradually deepens to 
purple and violet in some places, and the 
pink is very distinct, especially when, after 
looking at the simply white snow on other 
sides, you turn your eyes to the hill. Even 
after all direct sunlight is withdrawn from 
the hill-top, as well as from the valley in 
which you stand, you see, if you are pre- 
pared to discern it, a faint and delicate 
tinge of purple and violet there." But the 
vanishing beauty of this hour eludes even 
the pencil of Thoreau, and as you take off 
your snow-shoes you are aware that you 
have become the possessor of a day which 
you will always long to share with others, 
but the memory of which, in spite of all 
your efforts toward expression, will remain 
incommunicable. 



234 




CHAPTER XXVII 

BESIDE THE ISIS 

HERE is a wilful spirit in 
the study-fire which eludes 
all attempts to make it the 
servant of human moods 
and habits. It is gay and 
even boisterous on days 
when it ought to be melan- 
choly, and it is despondent at times when 
it ought to be cheerful. 

There is much that is akin to human 
thought in it, and there is much that is 
alien ; for the wild, free life of the woods 
blazes and sings in its flames. Its glow 
rests now on one and now on another of 
the objects that lie within its magic circle ; 
one day it seems to seek the poet's corner, 
and lingers with a kind of bright and 
merry tenderness about those rows of shin- 
ing names ; on other days it makes its 
home with the travellers, as if in fancy 
235 



mingling its softer radiance with the fiery 
brightness of the desert, or breaicing a httle 
the gloom of the arctic night. Sometimes 
it lies soft and warm on one of the two or 
three faces that hang on the study walls ; 
on the old poet whose memory lends a 
deep and beautiful interest to one of the 
quaintest of Old World towns ; or on the 
keen, pure face of one so modern and 
American that, although the cadence of 
the pine breaks the silence where he sleeps, 
he is still so far in advance of us that we 
cannot call ourselves his contemporaries. 
To-day it rests contentedly on a bit of 
landscape to which one's imagination goes 
out in these spring days as to one of those 
enchanting places which are its visible 
homes. It is a glimpse of the garden of 
New College at Oxford, with the beautiful 
Magdalen tower in the distance; the ven- 
erable trees, the stretch of velvety sward, 
the ivy-covered gate in the foreground. 
As the eye rests upon it memory fills in 
the imperfect picture ; the bit of the old 
city wall hidden by the dense masses of 
ivy, the walk shadowed by ancient trees, 

the sculptured walls of the College — these 

236 




Beautiful Ma^iiulcu tuwci m the distance. 



rise on the inward vision under the spell 
of this glimpse of the veneraMe town on 
the Isis. And with them comes that 
which no visible portraiture can represent ; 
the Old World silence and peace, the ripe 
loveliness, the brooding presence of ancient 
memories ! One feels here the deepest 
spell of that history which, although local- 
ised on an alien continent, is still the 
background of his own life ; that history 
which lives in names as familiar as the 
names of those who stand nearest us, in 
thoughts that are our constant companions, 
in words whose music is never silent in 
our memory. Melancholy indeed must be 
the lot of one who could sit under these 
ancient trees in this ancient world, where 
nature and art conspired centuries ago to 
lay eye and imagination under a common 
spell, and not feel himself in some sense 
one of the heirs of this incomparable 
inheritance bequeathed by history, art, and 
scholarship to this busy, changing modern 
world. P>om the day, now more than 
five centuries past, when the princely 
generosity of that princelv scholar and 
man, William of Wykeham, opened the 
237 



noble quadrangle of New College to 
"seventy scholars studying in the facul- 
ties," to this spring day, when the limes 
are green and the soft April skies spread 
over spire and tower, this place has been 
sacred to the " things of the mind." 

To recall the names of the Oxford 
scholars, from Roger iiacon and Wyclif to 
Jowett and Pattison, is to revive the most 
splendid traditions of English learning, and 
to traverse step by step the great stages 
of the intellectual growth of the modern 
world : mcdi:fvalism, with its kindred 
scholasticism ; the Renaissance, with its 
ardent teachers of the new learning ; the 
Reformation, whose visible witness to 
liberty and conscience stands in St. Giles 
Street ; the broad, rich movement of 
recent scholarship associated with a score 
of famous names. One may look through 
Mr. Hogg's eyes into Shelley's rooms in 
University College, where the slight, shy 
poet carries on his chemical experiments, 
or watch him when on Magdalen Bridge 
he abruptly snatches a baby from its 
mother's arms to interrogate it concerning 
pre-existence ; or take note of Addison 
238 



meditating under the elms by the Cherwell ; 
or of Johnson in his poor chamber in Pem- 
broke Gate tower ; or study the faces of 
Wolsey and Gladstone as they hang in the 
hall of Christ Church ; or strive to recall, 
in the week-day solitude of St. Mary's, 
the spell of those sermons spoken sixty 
years ago from its pulpit by one of the 
masters of English speech, who has been 
also a master of the things of the spirit. 
One may find all shrines of ancient wor- 
ship and consult all spirits of ancient wis- 
dom in this beautiful city, " so venerable, 
so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce 
intellectual life of our century, so serene ! " 
Well might the poet and scholar who loved 
her and honoured her with his own delicate 
genius, his own manly independence, add : 
"And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, 
spreading her gardens to the moonlight, 
and whispering from her towers the last 
enchantments of the Middle Age, who will 
deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm 
keeps ever calling us nearer to the true 
goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection 
— to beauty, in a word, which is only 
truth seen from another side .? " 
239 



There are glimpses everywhere which 
lure one away from this lovely garden of 
New College ; in every quadrangle there 
are associations with great names. But if 
one is in a meditative mood, he will be 
loath to exchange the silence of this vener- 
able garden for the magnificence of the 
Christ Church quadrangles or for the noble 
vista of High Street, which Hawthorne long 
ago pronounced the most impressive street 
in England. The spell of Oxford is in 
the air, and one comes under it most 
entirely when he loiters in one of these 
ancient fastnesses of the beautiful English 
verdure. As one waits on the genius of 
the place, one recalls the words of the 
pure and noble scholar whose life and 
thought had been an education to his 
country. No modern man has valued 
scholarship more intelligently and justly 
than Emerson. His life was gi\en to its 
pursuits, and his work, singularly free from 
the intrusion of the processes and termi- 
nology of scholarship, is ripe with its wis- 
dom and weighty in expression of its large 
results. " A scholar," said Emerson, " is 
the favourite of heaven and earth, the ex- 
240 



cellency of his country, the happiest of 
men. His duties lead him directly into 
the holy ground where other men's aspira- 
tions only point. His successes are occa- 
sions of the purest joy to all men." Never 
were truer words written ; the world does 
not reward its scholars as it rewards those 
who achieve more practical or more strik- 
ing and picturesque successes, but in its 
heart it honours them and recognises, by 
instinct if not by intelligence, that they are 
the ministers of its noblest interests. Those 
only who have had a share, however small, 
in the pursuit of knowledge for its own 
sake know how engrossing the pursuit is, 
and how all other forms of activity lose 
interest in comparison with it. There is 
for all such minds an irresistible fascina- 
tion in the scholar's work; a spell which 
makes the years one long preoccupation, 
and life an intense and insatiable hunger 
for more light and truth. The pedant 
deals with the husks of things, but the 
scholar deals with the great realities which 
are disclosed and expressed in the vast 
range of human knowledge. He lives 
continually in the great moments and with 
1 6 241 



the great minds ; he escapes the limitations 
of the passing hour into the great past or 
into the larger movement of his own time. 
The noblest works of the noblest men are 
his habitual companions, and he looks 
upon life with eyes which distinguish its 
main currents from its conflicting and 
momentary eddies. 

Here, within these ivy-clad walls, with 
this vision of mediaeval towers and turrets 
and spires, embosomed in a quiet in which 
great voices seem to be hushed, one 
believes with Emerson that the scholar is 
the most fortunate of men. One recalls 
the ripe and fruitful seekers after truth who 
have lived and died in these peaceful 
retreats ; pacing year after year these 
shaded walks, working in the libraries, 
meditating by the mullioned windows with 
all the magical beauty of Oxford spread 
out before them. Was it not Hawthorne 
who wished that he had one life to spend 
entirely in Oxford ? In this enchanting 
" home of lost causes and impossible 
loyalties " one could easily imagine himself 
becalmed forever ; always meaning to break 
the charm and return to the turbulent 
242 



world not two hours away, and yet always 
postponing the final parting to a morrow 
which never comes. 

From the reverie into which the firelight 
on the bit of landscape has lured me in- 
sensibly, I awake to find the fire dying and 
the sky splendid with the midnight stars. 
The towers of Oxford have become once 
more a memory, but that which gives them 
their most enduring charm may be here as 
well as there ; for here no less than beside 
the Isis one may love scholarship and 
pursue it, one may hold to the things of 
the mind against all the temptations of 
materialism, one may live his own life 
of thought. 



243 




CHAPTER XXVIII 

A WORD FOR 
IDLKNESS 

HE Study fire is some- 
times so potent a solici- 
tation to reverie that I 
ask myself whether it 
be not a subtle kind of 
temptation. Even when 
a man has cleared himself of the cant of 
the day, as Carlyle would put it, and 
delivered himself of the American illusion 
that every hour not devoted to "doing 
something " is an hour wasted, the inherited 
instinct is still strong enough to make a 
faint appeal to conscience. Those active, 
aggressive words, "doing" and "getting," 
have so long usurped the greater part of the 
space in our vocabulary that we use the 
words "being" and "growing" with a 
little uncertainty ; most of us are not 
entirely at ease with them yet. One of 
the highest uses of literature is the aid 



It gives us in securing something like 
harmony of life — a just balance between 
the faculties which are developed by 
practical affairs and those which need 
the ampler air of intellectual movement. 
Literature is the mute but eloquent wit- 
ness forever testifying to the reality and 
power of ideas and ideals. Every great 
poem is a revelation of that invisible 
world of beauty in which all may claim 
citizenship, but in which those alone abide 
who are rich in their own natures ; a 
world in which no activity is valued by the 
stir it makes, and no achievement meas- 
ured by the noise which accompanies it. 

When I recall these things, I perceive 
that the study fire is helping me to be true 
to myself when it gently lures me on to 
reverie and meditation. There is a vast 
difference between being busy and being 
fruitful. Busy people are often painfully 
barren and uninteresting. Their activity 
expends itself in small mechanical ways 
which add nothing to the sum of human 
knowledge or happiness. On the other 
hand, people who are apparently idle, who 
seem to be detached from the working 
245 



world, are often the most fruitful. Our 
standards of work and idleness are in sad 
need of revision — a revision which shall 
substitute character for mere activity, and 
measure worth and acnievement by the 
depth and richness of nature disclosed. 
The prior of the Carmelite convent at 
Frankjbrt described (jiofdano Bruno as a 
man always "^ walking up and down, filled 
with fantastic meditations upon new 
things." In the judgment of the busy 
people of his time, Bruno, although by no 
means devoid of energy, was probably 
accounted an idler. His occupations were 
different from theirs, and therefore, of 
course, to be condemned •, " so runs the 
world away." But time, which has cor- 
rected so many inadequate judgments, has 
overruled the decision of Bruno's critics ; 
they have ceased with their works, but 
those " fantastic meditations " have some- 
how sustained their interest, and there now 
stands on the Campo de' Fiori at Rome a 
statue of the scholar whose walking up and 
down attracted the attention of the Car- 
melite prior three centuries ago and more. 
In these apparently inactive hours of 
Z46 




^^ 



meditation great thoughts rise out of the 
silent deep over which a man broods 
inactive and absorbed. 

Balzac was a prodigious worker. Meas- 
ured by the standard he set, the real toil 
of most people who account themselves 
busy shrinks to very small dimensions. 
A kind of demoniac energy seized the 
great novelist when a new work lay clear 
in his mind, drove him off the boulevard, 
247 



locked him in his working room, and held 
him there in almost solitary confinement 
until the novel was written, and the novel- 
ist emerged worn, exhausted, and reduced 
to a shadow of his former self. This 
anguish of toil — for work so intense and 
continuous is nothing less than anguish — 
was prolonged through years, and the fruit 
of it fills several shelves in our book-cases ; 
and yet the highest work which Balzac did 
was not done in those solitary and painful 
days when the fever of composition was 
on him ; it was done in the long, appar- 
ently idle hours which he spent on the 
boulevards, and at the cafes. In those 
hours his keen and powerful mind was 
receiving impressions, collecting facts, 
observing men, drinking in the vast move- 
ment of life which went on about him and 
in which every social condition, every 
phase of character, every process of moral 
advance or decay, was revealed. These 
meditative hours, in which the hands were 
idle that the mind might have freest range 
and the imagination uninterrupted play, 
were the creative periods -, in them great 
works were planned, developed, shaped. 
248 









1% 



They were ,, 

the real work- , ,-\A / ^■'' J 

ing hours of 

the novelist, who displayed on an immense 

canvas the P" ranee of his day. 

One can imagine as he studies the face 
of Shakespeare or of Goethe, charged with 
the very spirit of meditation, what long 
and inspiring hours of thought, of deep 
brooding upon the mystery of the soul, lay 
behind the works of these masters of man 
and his life. Out of this profound silence, 
in which the soul opened itself, hushed and 
reverential, to the lessons of time and 
eternity, the great works grew as the tree 
and the flower spring out of the hidden 
places of the soil. Men of affluent nature, 
to whom thought brings its solemn revela- 
tions, and on the unseen horizon of whose 
souls the light of the imagination glows 
like sunrise on new and undiscovered 
249 



worlds, live in this mood of meditation — 
the mother of all the glorious works of 
art and literature which inspire and sustain 
us. These hours in which no activity 
breaks the current of thought are the 
creative periods ; hours solemn with that 
kinship with Deity which comes when the 
eye discerns the path of the divine thought, 
or sees with prophetic vision the image of 
that beauty with which all created things 
are suffused. The deepest life is as silent 
as the soil out of which the glory of sum- 
mer bursts ; all noble activities issue from 
it, and no great work is ever done save by 
those who have lived in the repose which 
precedes creation. 




CHAPTER XXIX 

THE BLISS OF SOLITUDE" * 

HEN I looked out of 
the study window 
this morning, and 
saw the wide stretch 
of country to the 
distant hills covered 
with drifting snow, which a fierce and 
wilful wind carried hither and thither in 
whirling clouds like vagrant wraiths, I 
knew what Emerson meant when he wrote 
that fine line about the "tumultuous pri- 
vacy of storm." Wind and snow bar all 
the gates to-day with invisible bolts ; the 
village is as remote and detached as if 
it were on another continent. Across all 
the avenues of communication is written 
" no thoroughfare ; " the road through the 
woods will remain for hours without a 
disturbing wheel, and with no traveller 
save the shy wild dwellers of the place, 
251 




glad of this sudden barricade against hu- 
man intrusion. On the hearth, as if an- 
swering the shouts of the riotous wind 
down the chimney, the fire burns with 
unwonted cheeriness. 

On such a morning, when nature takes 
matters in her own hands and locks the 
doors of ingress and egress without so 
much as saying "by your leave," one 
settles down to a day of meditation and 
reading with peculiar and unqualified sat- 
isfaction. No hand will let the knocker 
fall, with resounding clangour, at the very 
moment when you have completely lost 
yourself in some beautiful country of the 
252 



soul — some distant island where Prospero 
still holds his unburied rod and reads in his 
unsunken books-, some valley of Avalon, 
.,g^ where the apple blos- 

soms still rain the 
sweetness of perennial 
summer on the mailed 
hand of chivalry. Best 
of all, no disquieting 
voice of duty will 
call persistently 
from some remote 
quarter ; you have 
been bolted and 




barred against the intrusion even of your 
conscience. So lodged, one may give 
himself up to the solitude of the day 
without any other feeling than that of 
repose and delight, Happy is he to whom 
253 




life offers the gift of solitude ; that gift 
which makes so many other gifts available ! 
Happy is he to whom with books and the 
love of meditation there is also given the 
repose, the quiet, the isolation which are 
the very breath of the life of thought ! 
We are swift to praise heroism and self- 
denial when these take on striking forms 
and appeal to the eye or the imagination ; 
but how infrequent is our recognition of 
that noble resignation which takes the 
form of quiet acceptance of limitations 
which separate one from the work of his 
heart and divide him from the joy of his 
life ! 

Happy are they, however, to whom 

solitude brings its deep and satisfying joy 

— the joy of fellowship with great souls, 

of companionship with nature in that sub- 

254 



lime communion which Aubrey De Vere 
describes as " one long mystic colloquy 
between the twin-born powers, whispering 
together of immortality ; " of quiet brood- 
ing over one's thought ; of the rapture of 
the imagination detaching itself from the 
world of habit and work, and breathing 
the ampler ether of the great Idealisms. 
Nothing redeems a life from the barren- 
ness of continued activity so completely as 
a stream of deep, silent meditation running 
under all one's work, and rising into light 
when the day of solitude comes round. It 
has been said of Shakespeare that his face 
bears the marks of habitual meditation ; 
there is visible in it the calmness and ful- 
ness of a mind forever brooding over the 
deep things of life; steadied by contempla- 
tion of the unfathomable gulfs beneath, 
uplifted by vision of the shining heights 
above, calmed and held in poise by famil- 
iarity with the unmeasured forces which 
play about us. 

There is no shirking of common duties, 
no self-indulgence, in this separation from 
our fellows. The Irishman who defined 
solitude as " being alone with one's sweet- 



heart " was not so far out of the way as he 
seems at the first blush. For the soHtude 
that is a necessity to thoughtful natures is 
not isolation ; it is separation from the 
stress and turmoil of the world. Words- 
worth's life at Grasmere was a life of soli- 
tude, but not a solitary life ; on the 
contrary, it was enriched and ministered 
to by the most intimate and devoted com- 
panionship. That companionship did not 
introduce new and contradictory influences 
into the poet's life ; it brought no pressure 
of other and diverse aims and ideals to 
bear on his work. It confirmed and 
inspired him by constant and pervading 
sympathy. His days were spent in soli- 
tude, without solitariness or isolation ; the 
atmosphere of his fireside was not different 
from that which reigned among the hills 
in those long hours when the poet paced 
to and fro along his garden paths, chanting 
his own lines in low monotone. 

There is nothing more delightful about 
the study fire than the sense of congenial 
solitude which it conveys — the solitude of 
quiet, reposeful hours, " far from the mad- 
ding crowd's ignoble strife." The world 
256 



must be with us, but not too much with 
us, if we would gain that calm, complete 
mastery of ourselves which marks full 
intellectual stature. No large-minded man 
reviles the world ; he knows its uses and 
value too well for that ; it is the cramped, 
narrow, or morbid natures who seek com- 
plete isolation, and in the little circle of 
their own individualism find that satisfac- 
tion which comes to men of larger mould 
only from free and inspiring contact with 
the whole order of things of which they 
are part. It is not rejection of society, 
but wise and right use of it, which charac- 
terises the man who lives most richly in 
the things of the mind. One finds in 
solitude only that which he takes into it ; 
it gives nothing save the conditions most 
favourable to growth. The quiet hours 
before one's fire, with one's books at hand ; 
the long ramble along the woodland road 
— these make one free to brood over the 
thoughts that come unbidden, to follow 
them step by step to their unseen goals, 
and to drink in the subtle and invisible 
influences of the hour when one gives 
one's self up to it. There is nothing in 
17 aS7 



all the rich and deep experience of life so 
full of quiet joy, so freighted with the 
revelations of the things we seek with 
completest sincerity, as these pauses of 
solitude in the ceaseless stir and movement 
of the world. 



258 



CHAPTER XXX 




THE MYSTERY OF ATMOSPHERE 

OT many months ago an 
artist described a 
striking change in a 
landscape. It was 
a dull afternoon in 
September, and the 
stretch of sand dune, 
with its stunted trees 
and scattered bits of herbage, was gray as 
the sky and the sea. The narrow channel 
of a little estuary that ran back among the 
low hills was empty and bare. Two hours 
passed, and the busy sketcher looked up 
suddenly from her work to find the silent 
world alive once more. The tide was 
coming in, and the sea was sending a cur- 
rent out of its own fathomless life into the 
heart of the land. Up the narrow channel 
ran the eager, restless rivulet, widening, 
rippling, full of vitality, movement, and 
259 



colour, and changing on the instant the 
gray of sky and landscape into a warmer 
tone. A pulsation from the sea had trans- 
formed the landscape. 

On dark days or lifeless days the light- 
ing of the fire works a kindred miracle in 
the study ; it fills the room with life, 
colour, change. The four walls are un- 
changed ; the books look down in the old 
order from the shelves ; the table overflows 
as of old with magazines and reviews ; it 
is the same room, and yet it is not the 
same, for it is pervaded by a diff'erent 
atmosphere. 

Nothing is more elusive than this in- 
tangible thing we call atmosphere, but 
nothing holds more of the magic of beauty 
and of the charm of life. It is, indeed, a 
very subtle and pervasive form of life; the 
form which finds its delicate and fadeless 
record in art. Those transparent dawns 
which the lover of Corot knows so well 
are but marvellous impressions of atmos- 
phere ; the wonder is not in earth or sky, 
it is in the fusion of light and air. There 
is no bit of nature that a man loves which 
has not this spell for himj rocks, trees, 
260 



and running stream remain to-day as they 
were yesterday, but they are changed, for 
a different atmosphere enfolds them. There 
is no symbol of permanency on this perish- 
ing earth of ours so impressive as a moun- 
tain range; but there is no created thing 
so full of the mystery of change. Dis- 
tance, height, mass, and relation are never 
the same two hours together. On some 
mornings the hills are remote, inaccessible, 
immobile, of unbroken surface ; but when 
the afternoon comes, behold ! they are near, 
soft of tone, with outlines that seem 
almost fluid in their mobility, and with 
great fissures, full of golden light, opening 
their very heart to the day. 

This atmospheric quality finds its source 
in the imagination, and, resting on the 
bare, unchanging facts of life, transforms 
and irradiates them. To the fisherman, 
intent on his task or weary of the endless 
strife with storm and calm, the seas about 
Iceland are dreary enough ; but to Pierre 
Loti, with his sensitive, impressionable 
imagination, what miracles of light and 
colour are wrought on those far-off wastes 
of ocean ! So delicately and with such 



command of the subtlest effects of words 
are those changes registered, from clear 
skies stainless above blue seas to nights 
of fathomless blackness swept by polar 
bitterness of storm, that the landscape loses 
for us its fixed and changeless elements 
and becomes a flowing stream of force 
touched every moment with shifting and 
enchanting beauty. 

Shakespeare knew all the secrets of 
atmosphere, and, by reason of them, pene- 
trates the very sources of the life with 
which he deals, and makes us sharers with 
himself in this final and complete posses- 
sion. Other poets could have reproduced 
more accurately and with harder fidelity to 
bare fact the fixed conditions of Roman life 
under the first Caesar, and of life on the 
Nile in the day of the greatest siren who 
has ever sung men into forgetfulness of 
duty and indifference to empire ; but no 
one has touched those conditions with such 
semblance of reality, put into those streets 
such moving figures, into those dead and 
buried men and women such characteristic 
and individual force and charm, and into 
that faded past such glowing colour, such 



moving splendour, such varied and inter- 
woven charm. Brutus yielding to the 
noble importunity of Portia for confidence, 
and Marc Antony melting in purpose and 
energy at the glance of those languorous 
eyes and the sound of that full-throated, 
passionate voice — is there anywhere a 
contrast so fundamental, because so com- 
pounded of the invisible elements which 
belong, not to the fixed and stationary, but 
to the free and flowing side of life ? 

And the spell of this atmospheric quality 
lies in its spontaneity and unconsciousness. 
It steals into our thought and conveys a 
lasting impression while we take no note 
of its presence. Statements of facts, con- 
clusions, descriptions, we can deal with 
critically, because they are, in a way, con- 
crete and tangible ; but the colours in 
which these are dyed, the feeling which 
pervades them, the nameless, elusive quality 
which conforms them to the idea they 
embody or the character they express, find 
us unprotected and defenceless. Unless 
we resolutely close the eye, the landscape 
instantly records itself on the mind ; and 
unless we deliberately shut the imagination, 
263 



the artist works his spell within us. The 
fresh and penetrating charm of the early 
summer is not more pervasive and impos- 
sible to escape than is this intangible 
quality in a work' of art. 

To the artist himself it is not less 
mysterious ; it is part of his personality, 
and he cannot lay hand upon it. In the 
" Ode on a Grecian Urn " and the " Eve 
of St. Agnes " Keats was dealing with 
material as different in substance, colour, 
and form as the classical and the mediaeval 
ideals and manner of life. Of that differ- 
ence he was no doubt perfectly conscious, 
and he makes us realise it in a definite and 
distinct difference of diction, feeling, and 
treatment ; but there is a difference of 
atmosphere between the two poems of 
which the poet cannot have been conscious 
at the moment of production. There was 
in him an unconscious adjustment of mind, 
an unconscious response of the imagina- 
tion to the appeal of two aspects of life, 
separated not only by an abyss of time, but 
by a still deeper abyss of experience. That 
response is a vital act ; it is the activity of 
that deeper self whose secret is unrevealed j 
264 



it is creative, and therefore baffling and 
inexplicable. The rocks, fields, trees, and 
hills may be set down accurately on the 
map ; but no man can make record of the 
atmosphere which to-day touches them 
with beauty beyond the skill of art, and 
to-morrow leaves them cold, detached, and 
lifeless as the matter of which they are 
compounded. Students and critics have 
not failed to point out Shakespeare's 
methods of dealing with history and char- 
acter, but no lover of the great dramatist 
has ever discovered the secret of that 
power by which he gives to our imagina- 
tion the rude massiveness of the age of 
Lear, the fresh, varied, and vital charm of 
the Forest of Arden, and the colour, the 
languor, and the voluptuous spell of Egypt 
upon Antony and Enobarbus. 



26 s 



CHAPTER XXXI 




A NEW HEARTH 

N most men there is a native 
conservatism; even those who 
are progressive and radical in 
their view of things in gene- 
ral are stanch defenders of 
old habits and familiar places. 
The man who has his doubts 
absolute private ownership will 
hesitate long before cutting down some 
old-time tree whose beauty decay is fast 
changing into ugliness, or giving up the 
inconvenient and narrow home of child- 
hood for more ample and attractive quar- 
ters. We cling to old things by instinct, 
and because they have been a part of our 
lives. When Rosalind and myself began 
talking about a new and ampler hearth for 
the study fire, the prospect, although allur- 
ing, was not without its shadows. There 
was not only the consciousness of the sur- 
266 



render of delightful associations, but the 
thought of the newness to be made old 
and the coldness to be made warm. A 
fresh hearth has no sentiment until the fire 
has roared up the wide-throated chimney 
on windy nights, no associations until its 
glow has fallen on a circle of familiar 
faces. 

But how soon the strange becomes 
familiar, and that which was detached from 
all human fellowship takes on the deeper 
interest and profounder meaning of human 
life ! Rosalind had barely lighted the fire 
on the new hearth before the room seemed 
familiar and homelike. The bit of drift- 
wood which the children laid on at a later 
stage was really needed to give a suggestion 
of something strange and foreign to our 
daily habit. There is a wonderful power 
in us of imparting ourselves to our sur- 
roundings ; the fountain of vitality con- 
stantly overflows and fertilises everything 
we touch. We give ourselves to the 
rooms in which we live and the tools with 
which we work. It is not only the pen 
with which the great man wrote and the 
toy with which the little child played that 
267 



gain a kind of sacredncss in our eyes ; it 
is almost every object that has had human 
use. The infinite pains which Balzac put 
into the description of the belongings of 
his chief characters give evidence of that 
virile genius which caught not only the 
direct ray of character, but gathered up 
also its myriad reflections in the things it 
used. Life is always the most precious of 
our possessions, and it is because inanimate 
things often hold so much of it that they 
come to have a kind of sanctity for us. 

If the deeper history of our race were 
written, would not one half of it record 
the attachments which men have formed 
for visible and invisible things — for 
homes and churches and countries, for 
institutions and beliefs and ideals — and 
the other half record the struggles and the 
agony with which men have detached 
themselves from the things they have 
loved ? To humanise by use and by love, 
and then to forsake as the trees drop their 
leaves in autumn — is not this the human 
story and the human destiny ? There is a 
noble side to it, and a very painful side. I 
can readily understand the half-pathetic 
268 



■ 


^^^^^^B^^^^'^f^^^^^^^l 


^I^R^ 


HP 


WKB^^^i:^ ' l^^^^^l 


^^^^^^^^^K ^'" 


^^ 


ffl^^^l 


^^^^^^^. >y 


H. 


'^^ 




<^^ 


r . ^^^1 


^^^^^p£ 


W^ 


tS;^'^-,' J^'^W 


^^^^Hl 


^y^ 


jt^it^ 'V^ . (^ ^^H 


^^^^^^^^^^a 


'^NiT^ \ 


^HHPf ^/'.-'- '^^rV ^^1 


^^^^^^^^^^^IH9 


'.' ''"" '^'s^J? 


^P^^^^mhT"^ - ■">^ vi ^^1 


B^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^B 


m 


^mlia^^f- '^^^^^Zi 


|^^^^H|^^^^^H^v| 


^fctiB 


^^^^ '^^^n^KH^^^^H 


^^^■^^^^^^^^1 


^9 


^^^^■■^■jL^il^^^^^^^^H 


llw^^^l 


^t 


^^^^^^^BC^-. ' ^<i- _ 


■jj^^H 


t^.'-^. , 


Ib^^I 


i^^9 


i 


^^^^^H 


^^IH 




j^l 


HI 



note of those who recall the past with a 
poignant sense of loss ; to whom the 
great inspirations have remained in the 
beliefs and the ideals of youth, and whose 
later journey has been one ever-widening 
separation from the dear familiar things of 
long ago. The men in the earlv part of 
the century, who had read Addison and 
Dryden and Pope in childhood, could not 
be expected to discern at once the genius 
of Wordsworth, or to hear at first the 
ethereal strain of Shelley ; as to-day many 
who were nourished on Wordsworth and 
Byron and Keats are unresponsive to 
Browning or Rossetti ; and now that the 
massive harmonies of the German com- 
posers are filling the opera-houses, there 
are many who openly or in secret are 
longing for those brilliant Italian melodies 
which once captivated the world. The 
past must be dear to us, since it was once 
part of us, and when we recall its story we 
turn the pages of our own biography. The 
old hearthstone can never be other than 
sacred, since the light of it was on faces 
that we loved, and the song of it was 
often our own thought set to the cheerful 
269 



music which the logs sing when the living 
woods are silent. 

But shall there be no new hearth because 
the old hearth has so often warmed and 
comforted us •, no new song because the 
old songs set our youth to their thrilling 
music ? The charm of the past always 
remains ; we do not surrender it when we 
accept the new truth and listen to the new 
melody ; we are not disloyal to it when 
we live deeply and resolutely in the age 
which gives us birth. P^or myself, a radi- 
cal of radicals in the faith that the better 
things are always in the future, that truth 
has always fresh voices to speak for it, and 
art new inspirations to lend it new beauty, 
I believe that the only way to understand 
the past is to accept and live in the present. 
The true Wordsworthian is he who dis- 
criminates the great and genuine work of 
the poet from that which bears his name 
but not his genius — not he who insists 
that all the lines have equal inspiration. 
The true lover of Browning is not he 
who affirms the infallibility of the poet, 
but he who takes account of the ebb 
and flow of the poet's inspiration. The 
270 



true lover of the things that have been 
done and the men who did them is not he 
who lives in the past and lacks, therefore, 
a just perspective ; but he who lives in his 
own time, loyal to its duties and open to 
its visions, and who sees the past as one 
looks upon a landscape from an elevation 
which brings all its landmarks and boun- 
daries into clear view. Let the fire blaze 
on the new hearth and sing lustily in the 
throat of the new chimney ; its light still 
falls on the old books and gilds the familiar 
titles ! We cannot reject the past if we 
would ; it is part of us, and it travels with 
us wherever we go. Not by reproducing 
its forms, but by discerning its spirit, do 
we really honour it. It is an illusion that 
the past was fixed and permanent, and that 
we are in the seething flood. The past 
was never less mobile than the present ; it 
was always changing, and that which 
seems fixed and stable to us is the form — 
the only part that is dead. Read deeply 
any of the old books, and you will hear 
the roar of the rushing river in them as 
distinctly as you hear it in Hugo or Ibsen 
or Tennyson. Beneath the great tragedies 



to which the Greeks listened what a vast 
movement of the deeps of human thought 
and feeling ! Beneath the " Divine Com- 
edy " what a whirl of rushing tides ! 
Beneath Marlowe and Shakespeare what 
tumult of the great seas ! Genius means 
always and everywhere change and move- 
ment ; never yet has it lacked the vision 
which made the future dear to it. When 
that vision ceases to inspire the artist's 
thought and hand, genius will take its flight. 
For the deepest and most inspiring truth 
in which we live is the truth that life is 
change and growth, not fixity of form and 
finality of development. Things move, 
not because they are unstable, but because 
a divine impulse impels them forward ; the 
stars travel, not because they are wanderers 
in the skies, but because they are the ser- 
vants of a sublime order. There are no 
fixed and permanent social conditions, be- 
cause society is slowly moving toward a 
nobler ordering of its duties and its rights ; 
there are no final books, because the 
human spirit, of which the greatest books 
are but imperfect expressions, is always 
passing through manifold experiences into 



larger knowledge of itself and of the 
world about it ; there are no final forms 
of art, because truth has always new beauty 
to reveal and beauty new truth to illustrate. 
Let the fire on the new hearth sing its 
lusty song of the summers that are past ; 
its music has no note of forgetfulness ; 
memory and prophecy are the burden of 
its song. 



273 



i" 



CHAPTER XXXII 

AN JDVL OF WANI3ERING 




these spring days all manner of 
alluring invitations find their 
way into my study and by the 
suggestions which thcv bring 
with them make its walls nar- 
lJ- row and dingy in spite of the 
glow which pleasant associa- 
tions have cast upon them. 
When I sit at my writing table in the 
morning and carefully arrange the unwrit- 
ten sheets which are to receive the work of 
the dav, a playful breeze comes in at the 
window and wilfully scatters the spotless 
pages about the room as if to protest against 
work and seclusion in these radiant days 
when the heavens rain sweet influences 
and the earth gives back its bloom and 
fragrance. I think then of all manner of 
places where the earliest and tenderest 
beauty of summer abides ; the imagination 
274 












J^,^^ ^ • 




Like a cliiM let loiit<c tVoni ^ity siju.ircs, runs thiough i 
wliitf with daisies. 


I'-adow 



revolts against work and, like a child let 
loose from city squares, runs through 
meadows white with daisies and into bosky 
hollows where the ferns breathe out a deli- 
cious coolness. I cannot resist the impulse 
which nature yearly renews in this golden 
hour of her beauty, and so I sally forth to 
such refreshment and adventure as one 
may look for in the hey-day of spring- 
time. 

Yesterday I waved my handkerchief 
with the throng who crowded the pier and 
sent their huzzas after the great steamer 
swinging slowly into the stream, bound 
for that old world of historv and imagina- 
tion which has such hold upon the most 
American of us all. I followed the little 
group whom my affection separated from 
the throng on the deck until I could dis- 
tinguish their faces no more; and then, 
when sight failed, thought travelled fast 
upon their foaming wake, and travels with 
them still. I know what days of calm 
275 



and nights of splendour, when the stars 
hang luminous over the silent world of 
waters, will be theirs ; I know with what 
eager gaze they will scan the low horizon 
line when the first indistinct outlines of 
another continent break its perfect sym- 
metry ; I hear with them the first confused 
murmur of that rich old-world life; I fol- 
low them through historic street to historic 
church and palace ; I see the blossoming 
hedges and mark the low ripple of quiet 
rivers flowing seaward, the murmur of 
whose movement lends its music to so 
much English poetry ; I catch a sudden 
glimpse of cloud-like peaks breaking the 
inaccessible solitude of the sky, and in a 
moment the whole landscape of that rich 
world sweeps into sight and invites me to 
join them in their wanderings. 

This season stirs one knows not what 
ancient instinct still in the very blood of 
our race, answering the first voices of the 
birds returning from their long journey, 
and the first outburst of life flowing back 
in the flood tide of advancing summer. 
The history of civilisation is an Odvssey 
of wandering. From the hour when 
*76 



Abraham gathered his flocks and crossed 
the Euphrates, and those first Aryan 
ancestors of ours set out on their sublime 
emigration westward, to this day, when 
the axe of the pioneer rings through the 
California pine forests, and the camp-fire 
of the explorer rises beside the Congo, 
men have never ceased to travel hither and 
thither driven by a divine impulse to 
redeem and replenish the earth. In the 
long course of centuries the tent of the 
Arab is as permanent as the rock-built 
temple, and looking over history all races 
become nomadic. No race accepts its 
environment as permanent and final ; there 
is always somewhere beyond the horizon 
of its present condition an undiscovered 
Atlantis, an untrodden Isle of the Blessed, 
where life will beat with stronger pulse, 
and smite into the obstacles that surround 
it the impress of a higher destiny. As the 
thought of a great new world sent Colum- 
bus wandering from court to court, so the 
intuition of some larger and grander life 
impels men continually from continent to 
continent ; not restlessness, but aspiration, 
fills the sails and turns the prow seaward 
277 



forever and forever. The impulse which 
would not suffer Ulysses, old and travel- 
worn, to sit at ease stirs in the blood of 
the most modern of us all ; our hearts beat 
to the music of his last appeal, spoken 
through one of the greatest of our modern 
poets : 

" 'T is not too late to seek a newer world. 
Push off, and, sitting well in order, smite 
The sounding furrows ; for my purpose holds 
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 
Of all the western stars, until I die." 

Those to whom the impulse to wander 
comes in vain are not without their con- 
solations ; the most adventurous explorers 
have dared and won for them, the most 
accomplished and keen-eyed travellers have 
not forgotten them. When these fancies 
invade my study and invite to journeys I 
cannot take, I turn to the well-filled 
shelves, where my books of travel stand 
shoulder to shoulder and hold out a world 
which I need only cross the room to pos- 
sess. Sometimes a rose penetrates mv 
seclusion, and brings me visions of that 
far East from which it drew the first 
breath of its fragrant life. Then I find 



myself unconsciously putting out a hand 
for the well-worn books between whose 
covers Oriental colour and romance are 
hidden. I have long left behind the mood 
in which I read Lamartine with eager zest, 
but there are days when I still find the 
old glamour resting on the pages of the 
" Souvenirs d'Orient," and my imagination 
kindles again under the spell of that fervid 
style. The East stands in our thought of 
to-day for the old age of the race ; but it 
was in the East that life began ; and that 
buried childhood comes back to us with all 
the splendour of the earlier imagination. 
I hear once more the " sighing sakia " in 
Curtis's "Nile Notes," or draw rein on 
the great field of Esdraelon, flashing with 
the white blossoms of the Syrian spring- 
time ; I cross the desert with " Eothen," 
and meet the dreaded plague at the gates 
of Cairo. 

But the prince of travellers is the superb 
Gautier, whose rich physical temperament 
stood related to the Eastern civilisation so 
vitally that it almost made him, what he 
sometimes claimed to be, a veritable Ori- 
ental. The colour and glow of Eastern 
279 



life were in his mind before he sought 
them in Algiers and at Constantinople ; 
sensuous, full of delicate physical percep- 
tions of the rich and varied forms of 
Oriental living, Gautier used all the 
resources of his marvellous style to repro- 
duce the fading splendour which still 
remains among the older races. But 
Gautier, with his leonine face and Eastern 
temperament, had the sensitive imagination 
of a true traveller ; he reflected his environ- 
ment with a fidelity which brought out not 
only its reality but its ideal also. In the 
" Voyage en Russie" and the " Voyage en 
Espagne," no less than in his pictures of 
Algerian and Turkish life, we breathe the 
very atmosphere which surrounds him, and 
are conscious of a thousand delicate grada- 
tions of colour and manner which would 
have escaped an eye less keen, an imagina- 
tion less plastic. 

D'Amicis is less brilliant, less fertile, 
less subtly and marvellously endowed with 
mastery of the resources of speech ; but he 
has sharp insight, broad sympathies, a fine 
faculty of reproducing local colouring. 
His " Holland " is a classic of travel. 
280 



From those marvellous " Voyages " of 
Richard Hakluyt to the charming books 
into which Charles Dudley Warner has 
put his impressions of foreign lands and 
peoples, the literature of travel has been 
one of increasing richness and fascination ; 
but as I look over these goodly volumes, I 
recognise their kinship with the graver 
works of history that stand in solemn rows 
not far distant. The lighter volumes are 
records of personal wanderings ; the graver 
ones are records of those mysterious wan- 
derings of races in which history began, and 
which it will always continue to report. 
In this latest century we have seen a trans- 
ference of races far more romantic and 
impressive than that wonderful " Flight of 
a Tartar Tribe," whose story De Quincey 
tells with such dramatic skill. The ancient 
instincts still survive beneath the culture 
of civilisation, and ever and anon we are 
moved into strange, vagrant moods by their 
reappearance in consciousness. It is the 
shallower part of life, after all, that finds 
expression. Arts, literatures, civilisation, 
are the few drops flung into the air from 
the running stream, and made iridescent by 



the passing flash of the sunlight; the vast 
current of thought, emotion, experience, 
flows on in darkness and silence. Like 
the tropical tree, civilisation must support 
each expansion by sending down a new 
trunk to that ancient earth which cradled 
our infancy and from whom we can never 
be long separated. In the midst of our 
highest refinements, and under the influ- 
ence of our ripest culture, there comes to 
each of us that mood which Mr. Lang has 
so admirably expressed in his noble sonnet 
on " The Odyssey " : 

'* As one that for a weary space has lain 

Lulled by the song of Circe and her wine 
In gardens near the pale of Proserpine, 
Where that ^a;an isle forgets the main. 
And only the low lutes of love complain. 
And only shadows of wan lovers pine. 
As such an one were glad to know the brine 
Salt on his lips, and the large air again — 
So gladly, from the songs of modern speech 
Men turn, and see the stars, and feel the free 
Shrill wind beyond the close of heavy 

flowers. 
And through the music of the languid hours 
They hear like ocean on a western beach 
The surge and thunder of the Odyssey," 



CHAPTER XXXIII 

THE OPEN WINDOW 




■|\ x^^ HAVE noticed that at the 
close of a long winter the 
opening of the windows 
^-xl -i/j^ makes my books look faded 
y Wh^m and dusty. Yesterday, with 
/t\ xl|_Cj the bright firelight playing 
upon them, they were fresh 
and even brilliant ; to-day, with the soft 
blue sky shining through the window, they 
are old and shabby. 7'his singular trans- 
formation has taken place more than once in 
my experience, and as in each instance the 
spell has been wrought on the same books, 
I am forced to believe that the change is 
in me and not in my familiar volumes. In 
winter I find them opulent in life and 
warmth ; I feel in them the throb of the 
world's heart-beat ; but when spring comes 
and the warm airs are full of invitation to 
the senses and the imagination, they be- 
283 



come suddenly meagre, artificial, and com- 
monplace. They shrink from the strong 
sunlight, and in the affluent splendour of 
the summer they are the pale ghosts of 
their former selves. 

The world of books is at best a world 
of shadows ; one turns from it at times to 
drink anew and with unspeakable delight 
at the inexhaustible fountains of life. Com- 
mentaries are admirable in their place, but 
no true scholar ever permits them to stand 
long between his thought and the text ; 
they help him in obscure passages, they 
light up dark and difficult sentences, but 
they are only aids ; the text itself is always 
his supreme and final object. The man 
who goes to books instead of life, who gets 
his knowledge of humanity out of Shake- 
speare and of nature out of Wordsworth, 
will never know either profoundly. The 
Alps are more majestic than the noblest 
picture of them which artist ever put upon 
canvas, and men and women in the multi- 
form relations of life more wonderful than 
any portraiture by the greatest dramatist. 
It is this mistake of taking the commentary 
for the text which makes most literary 
284 



men the slaves of art instead of the masters 
of life and its lessons ; which fills their 
work with musical echoes and robs it of 
that mightv and commanding utterance 
which truth learned at first hand always 
finds for itself. 

The library is at once a storehouse of 
treasures and a prison ; its value depends 
entirely upon its use. If one's thought is 
hourly and patiently traversing the high- 
ways of human life, if one's heart pene- 
trates with deep and abiding sympathy the 
small and the great experiences of men 
and women, one may use books and find 
nothing but light and power in them; they 
will discover relations which have escaped 
observation ; they will bring within the 
horizon of thought vast and fertile tracts 
through which one has never been able to 
journey ; they will suggest answers and 
solutions which will aid immeasurably in 
the comprehension of the great mysterious 
fact of life. But if one goes to books for 
fundamental conceptions, for that experi- 
ence which one never really gets unless he 
acquires it at first hand, for those large, 
controlling views of things which ought 
28s 



to be the creation of one's individual 
struggle with problems and difficulties and 
mysteries, they will prove inadequate and 
misleading teachers. No art can conceal 
or preserve that which has been borrowed 
from another ; such second-hand creation 
often charms by its skill for a time, but its 
lack of vitality sooner or later makes it 
appear the barren, useless thing it is. No 
skill will save the picture which lacks the 
touch of nature, no art will give immor- 
tality to the book in which the pulse of 
life has never throbbed. 

To-day the generous warmth of the sun 
has tempted me out of my study and 
beguiled me into hours of aimless wan- 
dering. I have seen the great expanse 
of water between the arching elms, and 
have noted, with a kind of exultation, that 
the trees are no longer leafless ; the ex- 
quisite tracery of bare twig and 'branch is 
not so sharp of outline as when I saw it a 
week ago; a delicate colour suffuses itself 
over all, and blurs the edges that were 
sharp against the sky. A robin flashes 
across the stone wall, and yonder a medley 
of notes, dissonatit with anger, betrays the 



recurrence of those annual quarrels which 
settle the question of possession in more 
than one tree-top. A soft mist has touched 
the woods at the water's edge, and woven 
a prophetic charm over them ; I find mv- 
self already weeks in advance of the sea- 
son, for I seem to see even now the 
banners of summer afloat there, and to 
hear the inarticulate murmur of the forest 
weighty with the secrets of forgotten cen- 
turies. It is a new heaven which bends 
so benignantlv over me, and a new earth 
which stirs with unconscious life about me. 
x\ tide of creative energy surges through 
all things, and reinspires my faith in the 
coming of a clearer and yet clearer reve- 
lation of the divine mysterw In each 
recurring spring some sensitive soul has 
stood where I stand, and felt this subtle 
harmony with the new world bursting into 
leaf and flower about him, and, nearer akin 
to nature than I, has overheard some 
whisper of tree to tree, or bird to bi "d, or 
star to star. Straightway a new line has 
found its way into the world's antholo2\-, a 
new song has found words for itself in the 
vocabular)- of human speech, and finally, a 
287 



^ 






new book gets into my study. But, at the 
best, it is only a faded reflection of that 
luminous sicy which glows from this latest 
page, only a faint and confused murmur 
of that forest which I hear under the spell 
of this latest interpreter. The miracle 
remains incommunicable; no book will 
ever explain it to me ; it must be wrought 
in and upon me. 







0> 



288 



--°:ar,^j| 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



" 015 8635677 



<illiii(iMWM4JMSW 



